Dr. Linda Komaroff
Linda Komaroff is curator and department head, Art of the Middle East, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She received her PhD from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in the history of Islamic Art with a related minor in Arabic. She has been at LACMA since 1995. During her long curatorial career, she has helped to double the size of the museum’s collection of Islamic art, while in 2006 she began to acquire and exhibit contemporary art of the Middle East, placing LACMA’s collection at the forefront of American museums. Her international loan exhibitions of historical Islamic art include The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia (2003) and Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts (2011) and, combining historical and contemporary art, In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art (2018). More recently, she curated Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond (2023), followed by Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting (2023-24), the first exhibition to present Islamic art in the context of its associated culinary traditions Through her acquisitions, installations, and exhibitions, she has been concerned with challenging an American audience’s perceptions of Islamic culture and societies, and with demonstrating the deep connection between past and present, which is at the heart of any encyclopedic art museum.

Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi