Gwendolyn Collaço

Collections Curator Gwendolyn Collaço was the Assistant Curator for Art of the Middle East at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she has collaborated on several major exhibitions and curated numerous installations for the museum’s new permanent collections galleries. She also co-organized workshops with the Getty Museum and UCLA. Most recently, she teamed up with California Rare Book School to teach a hands-on course on Islamic manuscripts and print culture. Before joining LACMA, Gwendolyn served as the Middle Eastern Studies Librarian at University of Pennsylvania, where she oversaw general and special collections relating to Arabic, Persian, and Turkish materials, and collaborated with colleagues across the library on exhibitions.

Gwendolyn completed her joint Ph.D. in History of Art & Architecture and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation focused on the art market for single-folio paintings in Istanbul during the 17th to 18th centuries and the cross-cultural histories of collecting that this market supported. While completing her Ph.D., she also held the position of Visual Resources Librarian for Islamic Art and Architecture at the Aga Khan Documentation Center of Harvard Fine Arts Library (the sister institution to AKDC at MIT), where her role included cataloging, acquisition, teaching, coordination with imaging, and engaging faculty and public interest in visual collections. Gwendolyn has authored numerous publications on various aspects of the art and visual culture of the Islamic world, including albums, Levantine prints, costumes, and enamels.

She is curator of the Archnet exhibition Miss Kitty Lord and Her Egyptian Tours: A Burlesque Artist in Cairo, 1908-1912, a virtual version of the physical exhibition she also curated.