Dana Ostrander has been appointed Assistant Curator of Modern Art by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. She will begin this role on March 13, 2023.
In this position Ostrander will help shape the Museum’s exhibition and collection program with a focus on pre-1950s art through a global postcolonial lens. With the Kemper Art Museum's recent expansion, new and renovated galleries double the space allotted for display of the Museum’s renowned collection. The position offers unique opportunities to develop stimulating exhibitions and publications as well as to research and expand the Museum’s permanent collection with an emphasis on historically underrepresented artists.
Prior to joining the Kemper Art Museum, Ostrander was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, she organized the permanent collection gallery Modern Times and assisted with the exhibitions Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 and Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum. She has also held curatorial roles at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in addition to lecturing at Eastern Illinois University.
Ostrander earned a BA in art history and English from Wellesley College before going on to earn an MA and PhD in art history from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include global modernisms, art of the Americas, photography and medicine, and art made by underrepresented, marginalized, or amateur artists. Her writing will be included in the forthcoming edited volume Modernism, Art, Therapy (2024) and has previously been published in the exhibition catalogue Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum (2022) and the peer-reviewed Lapis: The Journal of the Institute of Fine Arts.