Mitra Abbaspour

Abbaspour earned with a B.A. in studio art and art history from Scripps College in 1999.^[1] She studied abroad in 1998 in Madrid where she interned for the director of the Galerîa Metta.^[1] In 2000, Abbaspour designed an educational database of the permanent collection of the University of California, Riverside (UCR) Sweeney Art Gallery.^[1] She earned a master's degree in art history from UCR in 2001.^[1] Her master's thesis was titled, Trans-national, cultural, and corporeal spaces: the territory of the body in the artwork of Shirin Neshat and Mona Hatoum.^[2]

Abbaspour was an assistant curator, museum writer, and director of public relations at the UCR/California Museum of Photography.^[1] She later became an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art.^[1] She earned a M.Phil in art history from the CUNY Graduate Center.^[1][3]

In 2016, Abbaspour became the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum.^[3] In August 2023, she was named the Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and head of the Harvard Art Museums’ division of modern and contemporary art.^[4] She begins the role on September 11.^[4]