Philip Brookman has been consulting curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art since 2014.

During his time at the National Gallery, Brookman has organized the exhibitions Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 (2025–2026); Dorothea Lange: Seeing People (2023 –2024); Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 (2018–2019); and Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2016–2017). He was a museum fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2020.

Brookman previously served as chief curator and head of research, senior curator of photography and media arts, and curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1993–2014). At the Corcoran, he organized or co-organized exhibitions on Eadweard Muybridge, Hank Willis Thomas, Taryn Simon, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, Jim Goldberg, Gilles Peress, Larry Sultan, Danny Lyon, and others. He oversaw the 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 has also organized and co-organized exhibitions for Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Additionally, he has held curatorial positions at the Washington Project for the Arts, Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Brookman 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.

Brookman holds a BA in art history and BFA in art from the University of California, Santa Cruz.