Artworks

LINDA KOMAROFF, Curator and Department Head, Art of the Middle East, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Linda Komaroff received her PhD from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, in the history of Islamic Art with a related minor in Arabic. She has been at LACMA since 1995. During her long curatorial career, she has helped to double the size of the museum's collection of Islamic art, including an 18th-century reception room from Damascus, while in 2006 she began to acquire and exhibit contemporary art of the Middle East, placing LACMA's collection at the forefront of American museums. Her international loan exhibitions of historical Islamic art include The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia (2003) and Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts (2011) and combining historical and contemporary art In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art (2018). Currently, she is working on two shows for 2023-2024, one historical (Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting) and one contemporary (Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond). She is the author or editor of several books and has written numerous articles and book chapters on various aspects of Islamic art. She is the recipient of multiple grants for scholarly research, including two Fulbright fellowships, and Metropolitan Museum of Art and Getty fellowships. She has taught at Hamilton College, NYU, UCLA and most recently, ASU. Through her acquisitions, installations, and exhibitions, she has been concerned with challenging an American audience's perceptions of Islamic culture and societies, and with demonstrating the deep connection between past and present, which is at the heart of any encyclopedic art museum.