Biography: Laurie Winters

Curator of Earlier European Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Laurie Winters is the Curator of Earlier European Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she has worked since January 1997. Winters’ academic specialty is French and Central European painting, but at the Milwaukee Art Museum she is responsible for a wide spectrum of periods and media. A native of Toledo, Ohio, Winters graduated magna cum laude from the University of Toledo, and received her graduate degree from the University of Michigan. She spent the early years of her career teaching as an Assistant Professor of Art History at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and Rhode Island College in Providence.

At the Milwaukee Art Museum, the exhibitions she has organized—often with international colleagues—have included a number of the best-attended shows ever mounted by the Museum. Among them are A Renaissance Treasury: The Flagg Collection of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture (1998–2000); Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland: A History of Collecting and Patronage (2002–2003); Rembrandt and His Time: Masterworks from the Albertina (2005–2006); and most recently Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity (2006–2008). In 2002, Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland was named one of the top five exhibitions of the year by Apollo magazine and earned Winters Poland's Cavalier’s Cross of the Order of Merit. The Biedermeier exhibition, which concluded in January, has been recognized as a model of international collaboration, with venues at the Albertina in Vienna, the Deutsches Historisches Museum-Berlin, and the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Winters is the author of numerous articles and essays for exhibition and collection catalogues and a variety of art journals. Her Biedermeier exhibition catalogue won the Vienna Art Fair Book of the Year Award for the best art history book in 2007. Winters has also taught graduate seminars on museum studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and has lectured internationally on such diverse topics as “Blockbusters with Brains: Steering a Course between Disneyland and the Ivory Tower,” “The Legal Machinery of War and Exhibitions,” and “The Spoils of War: Warsaw after 1945.” Among her many honors and awards are the Marvin Eisenberg Fellowship for outstanding achievement as a graduate student at the University of Michigan and the Fulbright-Hays Full Grant to France for doctoral research.

Winters is presently one of ten fellows participating in the inaugural class of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a program that prepares top curators for positions of leadership in museums.