Jane Panetta is Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Prior to this, she was the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator and Director of the Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she worked from 2013 to 2023.
At the Whitney, she led the collection team, overseeing acquisitions and collection displays, and planning for the future of the collection. She was part of the curatorial team for America Is Hard to See (2015), the Museum’s inaugural presentation of the collection in its downtown location; and she facilitated a number of critical historical acquisitions including key works by Carmen Herrera, Norman Lewis, Juanita McNeely and Jack Whitten. Panetta also served on the Whitney Museum’s Emerging Artists Working Group (which she co-led from 2018-2020) and has also been instrumental in building programming of emerging artists and related works for the collection.
Panetta co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and curated solo and groups show at the Whitney including Mirror Cells (2016), Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980s (2017) and organized solo presentations of the work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015), Willa Nasatir (2017), Juan Antonio Olivares (2018), Jill Mulleady (2020), Jennifer Packer (2021) and Rose B. Simpson (2023).
Prior to joining the Whitney, Panetta worked at The Museum of Modern Art for nearly a decade where she worked on a range of large-scale monographic projects as part of the Department of Painting and Sculpture including Edvard Munch: the Modern Life of the Soul (2006), Richard Serra: Forty Years (2007), and James Ensor (2009). Panetta has lectured, taught and written widely on contemporary art and sculpture, in particular, including work with Art in America, Modern Painters, Dia Beacon, Storm King Art Center, Yale University School of Art and Parsons/The New School. Panetta holds a B.A. in History from Haverford College and an M.A. in Art History from Hunter College. Panetta is also member of Madison Square Park’s Public Art Consortium.
