Mary Morton has been curator and head of French paintings at the National Gallery of Art since 2010. She previously served as associate curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2004–2010) and associate curator of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Houston (1998–2004).

For the National Gallery of Art, Morton has organized the following exhibitions: Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment (2024–2025); True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870 (2020); Corot: Women (2018); Cézanne Portraits (2018); Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye (2015); and Gauguin: Maker of Myth (2011).

While at the Getty, she worked on The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (2010); Sur le Motif: Painting in Nature around 1800 (2008); Oudry's Painted Menagerie (2007); and Courbet and the Modern Landscape (2006). While at the MFA, Houston, she organized Focus on the Beck Collection: André Derain's "The Turning Road, L'Estaque" (2002) and collaborated on Paris in the Age of Impressionism: Masterworks from the Musée d'Orsay (2002) and Old Masters, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow (2002).

As head of French paintings at the National Gallery, Morton has led the acquisition of works by artists including Gustave Caillebotte, Anne Vallayer-Coster, Anne-Louis Girodet, Karin Bergöö Larsson, and Simon Vouet.

She has published widely in her field on artists including Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Camille Corot, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Auguste Renoir. She has also taught at colleges and universities in the Los Angeles area, in Houston, and more recently, at the University of Maryland.

In 2018, Morton was awarded the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by France's Ministry of Culture.

Morton received her PhD from Brown University (1998), concentrating on 19th- and early 20th-century European painting. She also holds a BA in history from Stanford University (1987).