Image: Dr Ladan Akbarnia © Ladan Akbarnia
New appointee brings experience from British Museum, Brooklyn Museum and San Diego Museum of Art to lead curatorial team from September
The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge has appointed a new head of curatorial and professor of Islamic world collections.
Dr Ladan Akbarnia will join the museum in September 2025, having previously worked at The San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) as its curator of South Asian and Islamic art, and previously as curator and assistant keeper for the Islamic Collections at The British Museum.
Dr Akbarnia previously served as executive director at the Iran Heritage Foundation in London and associate curator of Islamic art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. There, she was responsible for the 2009 reinstallation of the Islamic gallery and the exhibition Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam.
Additionally, she was a consultant for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Museum Support Unit in Switzerland and taught Islamic art history at Smith College and Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
She has published extensively on a variety of topics, including cross-cultural transmissions between Iran and East Asia, Sufism and Islamic art, contemporary Middle Eastern art and methodologies of museum display.
As well as leading the museum’s curatorial team, Dr Akbarnia will be its first specialist in the art and material culture of the Islamic world.
On her appointment, Dr Akbarnia described the Fitzwilliam Museum as “an institution whose strong history of research and collaboration I have long admired.”
She continued: “I especially look forward to working closely with the team to support and enhance the development of the Museum’s collection, grow its innovative research and display programmes and help leverage the exciting possibilities offered by partnerships with the University and city of Cambridge and beyond.”
Dr Neal Spencer, the museum’s director of research and deputy director of collections said Dr Akbarnia’s experience made her “a perfect fit for the Fitzwilliam Museum, as we look to redisplay our collections and leverage our University context to innovate in object-based research that is relevant to our communities and audiences. ”
