Rachel Winter

Rachel Winter is the Assistant Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, and an art historian of modern and contemporary West Asia and North Africa. Winter recently curated the major exhibition Blind Spot: Stephanie Syjuco, which was supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. 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. She is now co-editing Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy with Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert, which will be published in spring 2024. Her future curatorial projects include Samia Halaby: Eye Witness (2024), and exhibitions featuring weaver Kayla Mattes (2024), and painter Nabil Kanso (2025); for her project focusing on Nabil Kanso, Winter was awarded the inaugural Salwa Mikdadi Research Award from the Association for Modern + Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran + Turkey.

Winter is also completing her Ph.D. in art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation explores how art museums in the US and UK came to be interested in the idea of contemporary art from the Middle East in the 1970s. Her doctoral research was supported by grants from the Albert and Elaine Borchard European Studies Fellowship, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Center for Craft, among others. She writes broadly about modern and contemporary art from the SWANA region, American art, and museums, and has published her research in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture.