March 14, 2011 Jessica May Promoted to Associate Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Headshot of Jessica May.

Fort Worth, TX, March 14, 2011—Amon Carter Museum of American Art Director Andrew Walker announced today that Jessica May has been promoted to Associate Curator of Photographs. She will continue to collaborate with John Rohrbach, senior curator of photographs, in managing the Amon Carter’s photography collection and interpreting and developing exhibitions on photography.

“Jessica has become an essential member of our museum staff and a key asset to the field of photography,” says Rohrbach. “This promotion is well deserved.”

“Since the day I started at the Amon Carter, it has been an honor and a pleasure to be part of this organization and to take part in building and exhibiting one of the nation’s finest collections of American photographs,” says May. “I am excited to continue that work into the next phase of my career.”

May joined the curatorial department in October 2006 after completing the Jane and Morgan Whitney Art History Fellowship in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her academic training is in the history of photography and American art. She holds a B.A. in art history from Barnard College of Columbia University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral dissertation, Off the Clock: Walker Evans and the Crisis of American Capital, 1933–38, led her to launch a concurrent project: the organization of an exhibition devoted to Evans, Berenice Abbott and Margaret Bourke-White entitled American Modern, which was shown at the Amon Carter last year. It is currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In addition to her work at the Met, May is the recipient of a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. The next photography exhibition May is curating for the Amon Carter is Subhankar Banerjee: Where I Live I Hope to Know, which opens on May 14.