Department of Photographs: Curatorial Team

Sarah Greenough is senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where she has worked since 1978. She has organized numerous exhibitions for the Gallery, including Alfred Stieglitz (1983), On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography (1989), Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (2001), André Kertész (2005), Irving Penn: Platinum Prints (2005), and Looking In: Robert Frank's “The Americans” (2009), all of which have also traveled to museums around the world. She was cocurator of The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (2007), Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860, (2008), Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial (2013), Garry Winogrand (2013), and curator of Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (2010), and Harry Callahan at 100 (2011).

Greenough is the author of many publications, including Walker Evans: Subways and Streets (1991), Robert Frank: Moving Out (1994), Harry Callahan (1996), Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set (2002), All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860 (2004), with Malcolm Daniel and Gordon Baldwin, and My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, 1915-1933, Yale University Press (2011).

Her exhibitions and publications have won many awards, including the International Center of Photography Publications Award for On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography and the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set. In 2007, Greenough and co-author Diane Waggoner won the College Art Association's Alfred H. Barr, Jr. award for outstanding museum scholarship for their exhibition catalog, The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888–1978. In 2009, Greenough won the Outstanding Museum Catalogue of the Year from the Association of Art Museum Curators' award for Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans," and in 2010 she won the International Center for Photography's Infinity Award for Publications for the same publication.

Diane Waggoner is curator of nineteenth-century photographs in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She received her PhD in art history from Yale University. She previously held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Since joining the department of photographs at the National Gallery in 2004, she has co-curated Photographic Discoveries: Recent Acquisitions (2006); The Streets of New York: American Photographs from the Collection, 1938-1958 (2006); The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (2007); and In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes Before the Digital Age (2009). The Art of the American Snapshot exhibition catalog was the 2008 winner of the College Art Association's Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for museum scholarship. She curated The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875 (2010) and collaborated with Tate Britain on Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848-1900 (2013). She is currently organizing East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography, to be presented at the Gallery in 2017.

Andrea Nelson is associate curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, where she has worked since 2010. She received her PhD from the University of Minnesota, focusing on 20th-century art and the history of photography. Andrea first came to the Gallery as a graduate curatorial intern in 2007, and later held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Modern Art at the Phillips Collection. She has published essays on German and American photography books, as well as organized several exhibitions, including A Subtle Beauty: Platinum Photographs from the Collection (2014); Modern Lab: Material Interventions (2012); and Reading the Modern Photography Book: Changing Perceptions (2009). She is cocurator of The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund (2015) and contributed to the accompanying catalog. In addition to her curatorial work, Andrea has taught courses on writing for the decorative arts, modern and contemporary art, modern design, the history of photography, and the history of the photography book.