Online Workshop Applying for Museum Jobs

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Ladan Akbarnia is Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at The San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA). Specializing in medieval Iran and Central Asia, her work also addresses cross-cultural transmissions; Sufism; Persianate drawings; contemporary Middle Eastern art; and methodologies of museum display. She has organized several exhibitions at the SDMA, including The Elephant in the Room (2020, 2023), Pearls from the Ocean of Contentment (2021), A Dogon Figure from Mali: Bridge to the Spirit World (2021), and Lisa Ross: Elegy to a Uyghur Homeland (November 2022). She is preparing two major exhibitions, Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World (2024), funded in part by the Getty Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and My Lines Speak of Destinies (2025). Previously, she was Curator of Islamic Collections at The British Museum (2010–19) and a lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World. She also served as Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art at the Brooklyn Museum (2007–10), where she organized a reinstallation of the Islamic collection and Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam (2009–10); and as Executive Director of the Iran Heritage Foundation in London. She received her Ph.D. in 2007 from Harvard University.

Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen has been a curator in the Middle Eastern Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, since completing her D.Phil. at Oxford University in 2002. She looks after the Arab World collections, specialising in the art of the Islamic West. She worked on the redevelopment of the Islamic Middle East Gallery (Jameel Gallery) and the Ceramics Galleries. She co-curated the touring exhibition Owen Jones: Islamic Design, Discovery and Vision. She has been the recipient of an Art Fund New Collecting Award to research and collect contemporary craft from North Africa, and curated the 2021 exhibition Contemporary Ceramic Art from the Middle East. She has led several projects to make the V&A’s Middle Eastern collections more accessible, including the Samarrafinds project and the REMAI collaboration with the Louvre and Alhambra. She has also published widely on the V&A collections and her own research areas. She is currently leading the Crafting Medieval Spain research project on the Torrijos ceiling, which will be redisplayed in V&A East Storehouse in 2024.

Laura Weinstein is Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received her Ph.D. at Columbia University, where she researched Persian and Urdu manuscripts from the Deccan. At the MFA she has lead the reinstallation of the Museum’s South Asian, Southeast Asian and Islamic art collections and has curated exhibitions including Ink, Silk & Gold: Islamic Art from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Megacities Asia, as well as numerous smaller exhibitions drawing on the MFA’s holdings.