Joanne Baron

Joanne Baron is the Peter J. Sharp, Class of 1952, Curator and Lecturer in the Art of the Ancient Americas at the Princeton University Art Museum. She specializes in the art, archaeology, and writing of ancient Mesoamerica, with a particular interest in Classic Maya ceramics, iconography, and inscriptions. She has conducted field research at archaeological sites in Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, and she has directed the La Florida Archaeology Project in Guatemala, where she oversaw excavations, artifact analysis, epigraphy, and public outreach.  

Baron’s scholarship focuses on the politics of the ancient Maya, its relationship to economic and religious institutions, and how these relationships were expressed through art and writing. She has published extensively on Maya patron deities, including Patron Gods and Patron Lords: The Semiotics of Classic Maya Community Cults (2016). She has also explored the monetization of textiles and chocolate during the Classic period (250–900) and how scenes on painted ceramics contributed to the spread of these economic changes. As a postdoctoral fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Baron curated Food of the Gods: Chocolate in Ancient Mesoamerica (2025). One of a small cohort of scholars with expertise in Maya hieroglyphic writing, she also developed a Maya-centered vocabulary for describing the iconography of ceramics in the photography of Justin Kerr, one of Dumbarton Oaks’s most significant archival collections. 

Before coming to Princeton, Baron taught for the University of Pennsylvania and for Bard Early College in Newark, New Jersey. She also brings a background of working with Mesoamerican Indigenous descendent communities in the cities where she has lived, particularly Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Baron earned her BA in 2006 and PhD in 2013 in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.