Diane Waggoner • Curator, Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art

Diane Waggoner is curator and acting head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. After earning a PhD in art history from Yale University, she joined the National Gallery in 2004, where she has organized or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 (2007), The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875 (2010), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900 (2013), East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography (2017), and James Van Der Zee’s Photographs: A Portrait of Harlem (2021). In 2020, she published the monograph Lewis Carroll’s Photography and Modern Childhood (Princeton University Press). Her current project, Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, co-curated with Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and New Media Arts at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, will be on view at the National Gallery, May 23-August 23, 2026.