Philip Brookman is consulting curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. There he has organized Dorothea Lange: Seeing People, Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 and Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He also edited the recent book Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 with the National Gallery of Art, The Gordon Parks Foundation, and Steidl. He was a museum fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles from January through March 2020 and is currently working on an exhibition about the relationship between photography and the Black Arts Movement.

Brookman was chief curator and head of research, senior curator of photography and media arts, as well as curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art between 1993 and 2014. He organized or co-organized many projects there, including exhibitions on Eadweard Muybridge, Hank Willis Thomas, Taryn Simon, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, Jim Goldberg, Gilles Peress, Larry Sultan, and Danny Lyon. He oversaw development of the Corcoran’s photography and new media collections, curated numerous exhibitions from the collections, and curated the Corcoran Biennial exhibition in 2000. Brookman also organized and co-organized exhibitions for Tate Modern and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and held curatorial positions at Washington Project for the Arts, Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego, and the University of California, Santa Cruz between 1977 and 1992. He is also a photographer, filmmaker, and writer, working primarily on issues of modern and contemporary art and photography. In 2015 Steidl published his book Redlands, a work of fiction with photographs.