Biography
Wendy Cooper
Lois F. and Henry S. McNeil Senior Curator of Furniture
Winterthur Museum

Wendy Cooper is the Lois F. and Henry S. McNeil Senior Curator of Furniture, Winterthur Museum. She is a cum laude graduate of Brown University and holds an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. Following her graduation from Winterthur, she was a Mellon Fellow at the Brooklyn Museum.

Before Cooper became a Winterthur Fellow, she had served as Assistant to John T. Kirk, then director of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Prior to her return to Winterthur as Senior Curator of Furniture, Wendy held several prestigious positions including assistant curator, department of American decorative arts and sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; director, DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Gallery, Colonial Williamsburg; and curator of decorative arts, The Baltimore Museum of Art. She is renowned for the many exhibitions she has curated and their accompanying publications. These include Paul Revere's Boston: 1735–1818 for The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Classical Taste in America, 1800–1840 for The Baltimore Museum of Art, and three for the National Gallery of Art: In Praise of America: American Decorative Arts 1640–1840; The Kaufman Collection of American Furniture; and An American Vision: Henry Francis duPont's Winterthur Museum. Her most recent exhibition, the groundbreaking and much-acclaimed Paint, Pattern, and People, Furniture of Southern Pennsylvania, 1725–1850, was presented at Winterthur in 2011. She is guest curator for the permanent installation of Masterpieces of American Furniture from the Kaufman Collection, 1700–1830 at the National Gallery of Art.