The Baltimore Museum of Art announced that it has hired three new curators. Asma Naeem will join the institution as chief curator; Andaleeb Badiee Banta as senior curator of prints, drawings, and photographs; and Virginia Anderson as curator and department head of American art.

Naeem, a specialist in American art and contemporary Islamic art, comes to the museum from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, where she served as the curator of prints, drawings, and media arts. Two exhibitions she curated at the museum are still currently on view: “UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar,” which she cocurated with Taína Caragol, and “Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now.” Naeem will lead the BMA’s team of curators, registrars, and conservators, and will be responsible for overseeing its collection of 95,000 artworks.

Prior to the appointment, Banta, a European Renaissance and Baroque art scholar, worked at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, where she had been the curator of European and American art since 2013. During her tenure, she curated numerous exhibitions, including “Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings” (2018), which was co-organized with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.

Anderson previously served as an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she taught courses on subjects ranging from museums and society to postmodernism. She previously worked as assistant curator of American art at the Harvard Art Museums from 2005 to 2010.

“We are committed to taking intentional steps towards evolving into an institution that emphasizes equity, excellence, and relevance in all phases of the work we do as a museum, not only for our Baltimore community, but to serve as a model for best museum practices nationwide,” said the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis director, Christopher Bedford. “Asma, Andaleeb, and Virginia will be instrumental in carrying out the museum’s new vision and we are thrilled to add their energy, ideas, and expertise to our curatorial team.”