Asma Naeem
Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director
Leadership
Asma Naeem (she/her) was appointed the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in January 2023. She is the eleventh director of the 110-year-old museum and also the first person of color and the first person raised in Baltimore to lead the organization.
Naeem is widely recognized for her advocacy of women and underrecognized artists, for her scholarship in contemporary and American art, and for her vision and work in collections diversification. She had previously served as the BMA’s Interim Co-Director since June 2022, and as the Museum’s Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator since 2018, organizing exhibitions on the work of such artists as Candice Breitz, Isaac Julien, Salman Toor, and Valerie Maynard. Her most recent exhibition, The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, still on tour, explored the political, cultural, and aesthetic attributes that have made hip hop a global phenomenon and established it as the artistic canon of our time.
Prior to the BMA, Naeem was a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, where her award-winning presentations included an early career retrospective of the work of Titus Kaphar and an historical and contemporary exploration of the silhouette through the lens of gender, race, and technology. She has written widely on American art, contemporary art, the South Asian diaspora, and museum studies. She published her dissertation as the book, Out of Earshot: Sound, Technology, and Power in American Art, 1847–1897, published by University of California Press in 2020. Naeem holds a BA in art history and political science from the Johns Hopkins University, a J.D. from Temple University, and a PhD in art history from the University of Maryland. She was also a Center for Curatorial Leadership fellow in 2020. Between her time as an undergraduate and obtaining her doctorate in art history, Naeem worked as a criminal prosecutor in Manhattan and an ethics prosecutor in Washington, D.C. She serves on boards in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Maine.