National Gallery of Art

Curator Biography

Diane Waggoner
Curator of 19th-century Photographs, Department of Photography
National Gallery of Art, Washington

Diane Waggoner is curator of 19th-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). Most recently, she curated East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography (2017).