Eleanor Jones Harvey has served as chief curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum since September 2003. She oversees the museum’s curatorial and conservation staffs and its acquisitions and collections programs. From January to September 2003, Dr. Harvey served as the curator for the museum’s Luce Foundation Center for American Art, which will open in the newly renovated museum building in 2006. Dr. Harvey’s research interests include 19th- and 20th-century American art, landscape painting, southwestern abstraction and Texas art. 

Previously, she was curator of American art at the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas.  During her tenure (1992–2002), she organized several exhibitions, including “The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–1880” (1998), “Thomas Moran and the Spirit of Place” (2001) and “The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic Masterpiece” (2002).  The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–1880 (1998), based on Dr. Harvey’s dissertation, won the 1999 Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America as the most significant contribution to 19th-century fine arts studies.  Her essay on artist Sanford R. Gifford appears in the exhibition catalogue Hudson River School Vision: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (2003).  She earned a bachelor’s degree with distinction in the history of art from the University of Virginia in 1983, and she holds both a master’s degree (1985) and doctorate in art history (1998) from Yale University.  She is currently working on an exhibition on the Civil War and Reconstruction, scheduled for 2008.

Anne Verplanck is the curator of prints and paintings and interim director of Museum Collections at Winterthur Museum. Recent projects include serving as host curator at Winterthur for “Paths to Impressionism: French and American Landscape Paintings from the Worcester Art Museum,” which is on view through January 15. In addition to her curatorial responsibilities, she is an associate professor in Winterthur’s Program in Early American Culture with the University of Delaware, where she teaches a class in connoisseurship. She co-edited, with Emma Lapsansky, the book Quaker Aesthetics, which the University of Pennsylvania Press recently published. Prior to coming to Winterthur, she directed the Luce Painting Project at the Maryland Historical Society and taught at George Washington University. Dr. Verplanck has lectured widely on the topic of portraiture and has curated several exhibitions on the subject. A graduate of Connecticut College, she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the College of William and Mary.

Barbara Burlison Mooney is an assistant professor who teaches architectural history in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa. After receiving her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Illinois, she has pursued research on eighteenth-century Virginia architecture and the built environment of African Americans. She also taught in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship has been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and her article on slave housing can be found in a recent issue of the Winterthur Portfolio. Dr.  Mooney's book, entitled Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and Native Elite, will be published by the University of Virginia Press.

Ann Smart Martin is the Chipstone Professor of American Decorative Arts in the Art History Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  With an undergraduate degree from Duke University, she gained a master’s degree in American studies and a doctorate in early American history from the College of William and Mary. She began her career as an historical archaeologist interested in ceramics and documents at such places as the N.C. Dept. of Cultural Resources, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (Monticello) and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.  She became an assistant professor in the Winterthur Program of Early American History and Culture in 1992, and the Acting Director of the Advanced Studies Department the following year.  She returned briefly to Colonial Williamsburg, then joined the faculty of the University of Madison-Wisconsin in the fall of 1998, where she administers the graduate and undergraduate material culture certificate programs and teaches the history of decorative arts, exhibition practices, and material culture method and theory.  She has lectured widely to academic and museum audiences. Her publications include the catalog Makers and Users: American Decorative Arts, 1630-1820 from the Chipstone Collection (1999), the co-edited volume American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (1997) and a special material culture issue of The William and Mary Quarterly(January 1996) Her forthcoming book is Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).  She serves on the editorial boards of the Winterthur Portfolio and Ceramics in America.