Fellows 2025

The Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) is pleased to introduce its 2025 cohort of Fellows. Now in its eighteenth year, the CCL Fellowship is the preeminent leadership program for curators, providing them with the skills and tools needed to become visionary leaders of art museums and cultural institutions worldwide.

This year, we are introducing two new exciting aspects to our program. CCL made the decision to offer the 2025 Fellowship tuition-free and received the highest number of applications than ever before. As a result of this vibrant demand, we are welcoming our largest cohort to date: fourteen outstanding curators from across the globe. This decision was guided by CCL’s core value of advancing equity in the field of curatorial leadership and our commitment to removing access barriers for applicants to our program.

The 2025 cohort has been selected by a group of leading museum professionals for this highly competitive program, each curator bringing with them a distinguished record of academic and curatorial achievement and a shared commitment to creating a more dynamic, equitable, and inclusive museum field. The cohort reflects the diversity and expansiveness of curatorial practice today, representing a range of institutional contexts, including ten institutions new to CCL, and expertise spanning thousands of years of artistic creativity across the globe.

CCL’s Fellowship program prepares curators to positively influence, evolve, and shape the future of museums. Remaining responsive to the changing museum landscape, the curriculum emphasizes innovative, cross-disciplinary, and values-driven approaches to leadership and centers the social responsibilities of museums. The program offers a generative space for learning and connection where members of the cohort can share ideas, problem solve, and support one another as they collectively work to make change in their institutions and in their communities.

We admire the great accomplishments and achievements of these exceptional curators and are excited by their potential as the next generation of institutional leaders. With this sense of promise and purpose, CCL is proud to welcome the eighteenth cohort to our growing network of over four hundred and twenty five alumni whose impact extends across the museum sector and beyond.

The 2025 fellows, listed alphabetically, are: Rehema C. Barber, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts / Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, Museum of Islamic Art / Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art / Francesca Du Brock, Chief Curator, Anchorage Museum / Courtney Gilbert, Assistant Director & Curator, Sun Valley Museum of Art / Healoha Johnston, Director of Cultural Resources and Curator for Hawai’i and Pacific Arts and Culture, Bishop Museum / Erica P. Jones, Senior Curator of African Arts and Manager of Curatorial Affairs, Fowler Museum at UCLA / Shalini Le Gall, Chief Curator, Portland Museum of Art / Margot Norton, Chief Curator, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive / María Elena Ortiz, Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth / David Pullins, Jayne Wrightsman Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy, Walker Art Center / Marina Reyes Franco, Curator, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico / Kevin Tervala, Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator, Baltimore Museum of Art