Blair Murphy

Blair joined the museum in 2018 as Curator of Exhibitions, where she shapes the vision for the exhibitions program and curates numerous exhibitions. Previous exhibitions include: Take a Number: Artists and Bureaucracy, Stretched, Applied Forces, Transitional Objects, Over, Under, Forward, Back, and By Proxy, the museum’s first virtual exhibition. In addition, she launched the museum’s biennial exhibition series, Assembly, in 2019 and Global Spotlight, a new series focused on international artists, in 2022. She also served as Acting Executive Director of the museum from October 2020 to May 2021.

Previously, Blair served as the Managing Director at DC Arts Center, Adjunct Faculty at George Mason University, and Program Director at Washington Project for the Arts.

Her previous curatorial projects include exhibitions at The Kitchen (New York, NY), Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Field Projects (New York, NY), VisArts Rockville (Rockville, MD), and with the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Blair has served as a guest speaker and panel moderator at cultural institutions around the Washington, DC area and New York, including the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. She has also written for many publications including: Hyperallergic, Bmore Art, and DCist.

She was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program. She holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MA from Georgetown University.