The Museum of Modern Art has named Makeda Best, a deputy director of the Oakland Museum of California, as its new chief curator for photography, it announced Tuesday. Her appointment ends a vacancy of nearly four years at MoMA’s photo department, in one of the most prestigious positions in the field.
“This department has influenced, implicitly or explicitly, so much of how we understand the medium,” said Best, who will begin in her new role in September. In an interview, Best pointed to the legacy of Edward Steichen, who led MoMA’s photo department from 1947 to 1962, and whose acquisitions included large caches of photographs from the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. “Steichen talked about the collection he was building of F.S.A. photography as an argument about America,” Best explained. “And that became really influential to me as a curator. I’m someone who’s very much committed to big stories from the collection.”
Like Steichen, Best is also a photographer, who trained at CalArts under the artist Allan Sekula. She went on to complete a doctorate in art history at Harvard, and eventually returned to Cambridge to serve as curator of photography at the Harvard Art Museums. There she organized “Devour the Land,” an acclaimed exhibition of war photography, and “Time Is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America,” which blended documentary imagery with literary history.
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She joined the Oakland Museum in 2023, where she has overseen its collection displays and special exhibitions. She has also continued to curate shows elsewhere; her exhibition “American Job,” surveying a century of labor and American photography, was seen at the International Center of Photography in New York last year.
MoMA’s photo collection, numbering some 35,000 prints and objects, includes both artworks and documentary materials from the dawn of the medium in the 1840s to the present day. Since 2019, when MoMA reopened in an expanded headquarters, the museum has presented photography within a single flowing narrative of modern painting, sculpture, drawing and design, rather than in a separate wing. “I do enjoy how the museum has integrated photography throughout the collection,” said Best, adding, “The actual choices that curators make are brought into sharper relief, and that process to me is exciting.”
While much of Best’s scholarship and curatorial experience has focused on documentary and social photography, she also wants to “expand the kinds of photography that we see” at the museum, and to reckon with the effect of digital media on how we pay attention to images. “Photography is a medium that’s always been in crisis, that’s always questioning itself,” she said. “That is its history. So in many ways, this is another moment in which — as a field, as a medium — we’re trying to figure out who we are and what it means.
“And I think audiences are asking for different things as well. One way to read it is that they’re distracted, but another way to think about it is that they’re looking for something beyond content. They’re looking for experiences, connection.”
That requires a new approach to installation and storytelling, Best argued: “It doesn’t work anymore just to hang things on the wall.”
Best succeeds Clément Chéroux, who led the photography department from 2020 to 2022. (Roxana Marcoci, a senior MoMA curator, has been leading the department on an interim basis since then.) Best is the second chief curator appointed by Christophe Cherix, who became director of the museum in 2025. In October he appointed Jodi Hauptman to lead the department of drawings, which Cherix himself chaired before his promotion.
