Sharon Matt Atkins

Deputy Director for Art, Brooklyn Museum

Since joining the Brooklyn Museum in 2009, Sharon Matt Atkins has held several positions, including Managing Curator of Exhibitions and Director of Curatorial Affairs. At the Brooklyn Museum, she has organized many exhibitions, including co-curating the exhibition JR: Chronicles (2019) and the recent installation Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas (2018–19). She also organized Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller (2016), Stephen Powers: Coney Island Is Still Dreamland (To a Seagull) (2015), FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds (2015), Swoon: Submerged Motherlands (2015), and the Brooklyn presentation of Ai Weiwei: According to What? (2014). In 2012, she co-organized GO: a community-curated open studio project with Shelley Bernstein. She has also coordinated exhibitions devoted to Andy Warhol and Norman Rockwell, and has facilitated numerous other special exhibitions. Atkins is a member of the Association of Art Museum Curators Board of Trustees and co-chair of its membership committee.

Before her move to Brooklyn, Atkins had been the Assistant Curator at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, since 2004. There, she was responsible for modern and contemporary art, and organized exhibitions from the collection as well as traveling loan shows. Previously, she held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University. Atkins received an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she also taught art history and writing courses.