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. 

Since joining the museum, she has worked on several major exhibitions. Most recently, she curated Samia Halaby: Eye Witness, which was the MSU alum’s first American museum retrospective. This exhibition was accompanied by the book Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy, co-edited with Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert, which was named outstanding monograph by the Midwest Art History Society. Prior to that, she curated Kayla Mattes: DOOMSCROLLING (2024), the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, and Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco (2023). Rachel 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. She is now working on the exhibitions Nabil Kanso: Echoes of War, opening Feb. 7, 2025, and unbecoming, a survey of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Diana Al-Hadid that opens Jun. 7, 2025.  

Outside the museum, Rachel writes broadly about modern and contemporary art from the SWANA region, American art, and museums, and has published her research in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture, which you can read on her academia.edu page. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art & Architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in September 2024. Rachel is a faculty affiliate of the MSU Muslim Studies Program, and a member of the Association of Art Museum Curators, the College Art Association, and the Association for Modern + Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran + Turkey. In her free time, you’ll find Rachel walking her dog, drinking coffee, and baking gluten-free treats.