Lauren Haynes is Head Curator, Governors Island Arts, and Vice President at the Trust for Governors Island in New York City, and has held numerous curatorial positions at institutions across the U.S. She was recently appointed Executive Director of Atlanta Contemporary in Georgia, which she will begin in March.
Previously, she was Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs at the Queens Museum, New York; Director of Artist Initiatives and Curator, Contemporary Art, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas; and Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art. As a specialist in African-American modern and contemporary art, Haynes also spent nearly a decade at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she was the Associate Curator for the permanent collection and curated dozens of exhibitions at the Studio Museum and contemporary art institutions in New York. She serves on the board of the Association of Art Museum Curators and on the visiting committee for the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, was a 2018 Center for Curatorial Leadership fellow, and a recipient of a 2020 ArtTable New Leadership Award. In 2023, President Joe Biden appointed Haynes to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House.
