Rachel Winter

Rachel Winter wants to make the museum a key part of everyone’s university experience: “University art museums are important spaces for innovation and collaboration that not only generate thought-provoking exhibitions, but can transform the ways students learn, and faculty teach.”  

Rachel came to the MSU Broad Art Museum in 2022 from California. As an art historian and curator of global contemporary art, she focuses on modern and contemporary art from West Asia and North Africa. Her ongoing research considers how art museums in the US and the UK became interested in the idea of contemporary art from the Middle East beginning in the 1970s. She is excited to bring this research to Michigan because it resonates with the state’s history as a home for many people from the Arab world, including artists. 

At the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, her recent curatorial projects include “unbecoming,” a mid-career survey of Syrian-American Artist Diana Al-Hadid, “Samia Halaby: Eye Witness,” which was the artist’s first American Museum retrospective, and “Kayla Mattes: DOOMSCROLLING,” the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, and “Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco.” Prior to that, she was part of the curatorial team that realized “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Flint Is Family In Three Acts” (2022), a collaborative, multi-site exhibition that brought the three acts of Frazier’s photographic series about the Flint water crisis to Michigan for the first time, and “Zaha Hadid Design: Untold” (2022), the largest retrospective of work by Zaha Hadid Design to date.

As a writer, her work focuses on artists from the SWANA region, expanded ideas of American art, and museums. She co-edited the book “Diana Al-Hadid: unbecoming” with Molly Taylor, and “Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy” with Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert, which was awarded outstanding monograph by the Midwest Art History Society. Her other recent articles focus on Halil Altindere, Samia Halaby, and Ethel Wright Mohamed.

Winter is also a lecturer in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, and affiliate faculty with the Muslim Studies Program and the Center for Gender in Global Context.