Laura Giles

Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr., Class of 1970, Curator of Prints and Drawings
(609) 258-3764

After holding curatorial positions at the Spencer Art Museum of Art at the University of Kansas and the Art Institute of Chicago, Laura M. Giles joined the Art Museum in 2000, and in 2010 was appointed its inaugural Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr., Class of 1970, Curator of Prints and Drawings. She attended Swarthmore College and Williams College, and received her Ph.D. in art history from Harvard University.  Her scholarly fields of interest are Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, and Western drawings and prints from the 16th-century to the present, on which she has published numerous articles.  She has curated a wide range of exhibitions of works on paper at the Museum, including Cézanne in Focus: Watercolors from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection (2002) and 500 Years of Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum (2014), both of which were accompanied by publications. In addition to organizing rotations of prints and drawings in the galleries and the Works on Paper Study Room, most recently she co-curated the special exhibition States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing (2019-20). Future projects include research on the Museum’s large collection of British drawings and watercolors. She attended Swarthmore College and Williams College, and received her Ph.D. at Harvard University.