Lisa Graziose Corrin has been named director of Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.
Corrin, the former director of the Williams College Museum of Art, will start work at NU Feb. 1. She will succeed David Alan Robertson who’s retiring Dec. 31.
Corrin is currently a Clark Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and visiting scholar in museum studies at New York University. She ran the museum at Williams from 2005 until last June.
“Lisa will bring extensive curatorial experience, deep knowledge of contemporary art, visionary programming and intellectual leadership to the Block,” said Northwestern President Morton Schapiro, who was president at Williams College for part of the time Corrin ran the museum there.
“We are thrilled that, following our national search, she has agreed to head up the Block,” Schapiro said.
Schapiro says Corrin raised the campus profile of the museum at Williams and deepened its commitment to its teaching mission.
She taught graduate and undergraduate students in the Williams art department, and, through the use of the museum, she significantly strengthened faculty and student engagement in teaching and learning across various fields of study.
She also raised participation in public programs and related activities, and she continued to develop partnerships with area museums — the Clark Art Institute and MASS MoCA — as well as with college and university art museums nationally.
Prior to her work at Williams, Corrin served as the deputy director of art and the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, as chief curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London and as assistant director and chief curator of the nomadic Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.