Karen E. Milbourne

Karen E. Milbourne, PhD is the new J. Sanford Miller Family Director at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA. Previously, she was the senior curator at the National Museum of African Art, a Smithsonian Institution located in Washington DC, since 2008. Before taking the Directorship at The Fralin, she also served on the museum’s senior management team as Acting Head of Knowledge Production. Previously, she was Associate Curator of African Art and Department Head for the Arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific Islands at The Baltimore Museum of Art, and prior to that, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY. In January 2024, she began her new position as the J. Sanford Miller Family Director of The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia as it builds a new Center for the Arts. 

She has worked extensively with the arts and pageantry of western Zambia and contemporary African art. Since joining the NMAfA, she has curated the exhibition series Artists in Dialogue (2009, 2012) and the focus shows, A Brave New World (2010), Market Symphony by Emeka Ogboh (2016), and Jim Chuchu’s Invocations (2017) and provided the in-house supervision for the exhibitions, Yinka Shonibare MBE (2009), Central Nigeria Unmasked (2011), The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, Taste! in Lagos, Nigeria (2021), Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits (2022), and The Demonstration in Johannesburg, South Africa (2022). Her traveling exhibition, Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (2013) is accompanied by an award-winning scholarly book published by Monacelli Press. She co-curated Senses of Time: Video and Film-based Art of Africa with Polly Roberts of LACMA and UCLA, Views of Africa at the National Air and Space Museum with Andrew Johnson, the award-winning Visionary: Perspectives on Africa’s Arts (2017) at the NMAfA. Her exhibition, I Am… Contemporary Women Artists of Africa (2019) and its accompanying book received the 2021 Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize, Create to Free Yourselves: Georges Adéagbo at President Lincoln’s Cottage (2023), John Akomfrah: Five Murmurations (2023), From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson (2023), featuring all new work by the artist and accompanied by the first monograph of her practice, Georges Adéagbo: Create to Free Yourselves, John Akomfrah: Five Murmurations (2024), and From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson (2024).

Karen received her PhD in Art History from The University of Iowa in 2003 and has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship, ACASA Award for Curatorial Excellence, AAMC Award for Curatorial Excellence, Smithsonian Secretary’s Award for Excellence and two Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prizes. Her publications appear in edited volumes and such journals as African Arts, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Papers, ARS, and Collections. She currently serves on the Scientific Committee for AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions), the advisory board for the Lusaka Contemporary Art Center, and is the former Chair of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowships.