Anne Pasternak

Anne Pasternak (born 1964) is a curator and museum director. She is the current Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum.

Pasternak was born in Baltimore and received her undergraduate degree in Art History and Business Management from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She went on to take graduate courses at Hunter College but left without taking a degree.

Pasternak has been awarded honorary doctorates from Pratt Institute^[1] and Hunter College^[2]

Pasternak's career began with an internship turned directorship at the Stux Gallery in Boston in the 1980s. She then served as Curator at Real Art Ways, an arts nonprofit in Hartford, Connecticut. She curated public art projects with such now acclaimed artists as Mel Chin and Mark Dion as well as the groundbreaking exhibition "Hip Hop Nation".

In 1993 Anne Pasternak left Real Art Ways and became the executive director of Creative Time. There she curated and organized numerous exhibitions, events, discussions, and public art projects including the annual "Tribute In Light" memorial honoring the lives lost on September 11, 2001; Paul Chan's Waiting for Godot in Post-Katrina New Orleans, and Kara Walker's A Subtlety in Brooklyn's Domino Sugar Factory in the Williamsburg neighborhood.^[3]

In 2015, Pasternak left Creative Time and replaced Arnold L. Lehman as the director of the Brooklyn Museum.^[4] Pasternak's directorship at the Brooklyn Museum marks the first time a woman has kept a directing role in an encyclopedic New York museum.^[5] As a former director of a public art organization, this new position represents a shift in her career from a broader public sphere into the architecture of a museum.^[5]

Her portrait is included in the series of Female Museum Art Director by artist Amy Chaiklin.[1]

• Ufficiale dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia, 2018^[6]
• Crains 50 Most Powerful Women in New York, 2019^[7]

In October 2019, the museum has deaccessioned a Francis Bacon painting through a Sotheby's auction. During his lifetime, Bacon wrote of the artwork that, “It was a throw-out and it depresses me […] that it has years later found its way onto the art market and I would prefer if it were not exhibited.”^[8] At this time, the museum was still running on a multi-million dollar deficit.

On June 12, 2024, Pasternak's residence was vandalized with red paint and a banner with text of her name, "Brooklyn Museum", "White-Supremacist Zionist", and "Funds Genocide".^[9][10] This was part of a coordinated action that targeted three other officials of the museum, which has faced controversy both before, and after October 7, over its funding and alleged financial ties to Israel, its hosting of the "This Place" photography exhibition,^[11][12] as well as police crackdown of one such protest, characterized as "violent".^[13] New York City Mayor Eric Adams, called the event "overt, unacceptable antisemitism.” The NYPD has released surveillance footage depicting five suspects and asking the public for help identifying them. They have not determined whether the five individuals were also behind the other acts of vandalism.^[14] Some elected officials alleged anti-semitic motive for the vandalism without substantiation, including Senator Chuck Schumer,^[15] Councilmember Lincoln Restler,^[16] and Comptroller Brad Lander,^[17] who erroneously stated that the board members targeted were Jewish.

By early August 6, 2024, two people had been arrested and charged with a hate crime for their alleged involvement in the vandalism.^[18][19]