Diane Waggoner is acting head and curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. She previously held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. 

Since joining the National Gallery in 2004, she has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (2007), the 2008 winner of the College Art Association's Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for museum scholarship; The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875 (2010); Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900 (2013), East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography (2017); The Eye of the Sun: Nineteenth-Century Photographs from the National Gallery of Art (2019); and By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs (2019), and James Van Der Zee’s Photographs: A Portrait of Harlem (2021). In 2020, she published the monograph Lewis Carroll’s Photography and Modern Childhood (Princeton University Press).  

Waggoner holds a PhD in art history from Yale University.