Inside the Museum

Lynn Zelevansky has been The Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art since 2009. She formerly served as the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she organized numerous exhibitions, including Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea, the award-winning Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s to 1970s, and Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama. Prior to her work at LACMA, she spent seven years in the department of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where, among many other exhibitions, she organized Projects: Gabriel Orozco and Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties, as well as working with curator William Rubin on the much-lauded Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism.

A born and bred New Yorker, Zelevansky began her undergraduate studies in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at Carnegie Mellon University, before returning to New York to earn a BFA at Pratt Institute and an MA in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She started her career as a university arts professor, teaching classes at The New School for Social Research in New York City, The Cooper Union in New York City, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

While an art curator at MoMA and LACMA, Zelevansky earned numerous awards for her curatorial work, including the 2005 First Place Award for “Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally” from the US Branch of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) for Beyond Geometry; and a 1994/95 award for “Best Museum Exhibition of Emerging Art from the AICA’s North American Branch” for Sense and Sensibility. She has had extensive international experience with art and artists in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Japan, and Korea, as well as in Europe.