Katelyn Crawford, PhD

She/Her

The William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art

Katelyn D. Crawford was appointed Curator of American Art in 2017. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia, where she also taught, and a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University.

Prior to joining the BMA, Crawford served as Assistant Curator, American Art, at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. At the Nelson-Atkins, she curated a number of exhibitions from the permanent collection including The 1930s in Prints: A Gift to Kansas City from The Woodcut Society (2016) and Drip, Splatter, Wash: American Watercolor, 1860–1960 (2016). She was also a member of the curatorial teams presenting American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood (2015) and a focus presentation of Hale Woodruff’s murals painted for Talladega College, drawn from Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College (2015). With colleagues in the Nelson-Atkins Education department, she also developed a curriculum that used objects in the American art collection to teach the content on the Civics portion of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Naturalization Test to new immigrants residing in the area.

Before working at the Nelson-Atkins, Crawford held research fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Winterthur Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art, where she studied early American portrait painters and their work in the Caribbean. A Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship also supported this research. She has presented this work at museums and conferences and published on artist John Greenwood with the University of Virginia Press.