Peter Galassi

Peter Galassi (Washington, D.C., United States, 1951) is a graduate of Harvard University and a doctor of Art History and Archeology from Columbia University. Galassi is a scholar and curator whose principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art. He was Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for two decades from 1991 to 2011. Having begun as a curatorial intern in 1974, and joining the photography department seven year later, he was only the fourth person to serve as Chief Curator when he took over from John Szarkowski in 1991. At MoMA he curated more than 40 exhibitions including Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (1981), Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort (1991), American Photography 1890–1965 (1995), Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills (1997), and major surveys of Henri Cartier-Bresson (2010), Roy DeCarava (1996), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1998), Andreas Gursky (2001), Lee Friedlander (2005) and Jeff Wall (2007). Since leaving MoMA, he has been working on independent writing and curatorial projects, including the exhibition Robert Frank in America at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center (2014). He is currently curator a Brassaï retrospective open at Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona, 2018.