Diane C. Wright

Diane C. Wright joined the Toledo Museum of Art in 2017 and currently serves as the senior curator of glass and contemporary craft. Previously, she was the Carolyn and Richard Barry Curator of Glass at the Chrysler Museum of Art where she curated a dozen exhibitions and published the collections catalog Glass: Masterworks from the Chrysler Museum of Art.

At the Toledo Museum, Wright has curated Celebrating Libbey Glass: 1818-2018; Katherine Gray: Being in a Hotshop; Anila Agha: Between Light and Shadow; Luminous Visions: Phillip K. Smith and Light Across the Collection; Matt Wedel: Phenomenal Debris, the artist’s first major museum exhibition; and Beth Lipman: ReGift. She served as the organizing curator for The Path to Paradise: Judith Schaechter’s Stained Glass Art; The Age of Armor: Treasures from the Higgins Armory Collection at the Worcester Art Museum; Bestowing Beauty, Masterpieces from Persian Lands; and Wayne Thiebaud: One Hundred Paintings, Prints, and Drawings. She is co-curating the forthcoming exhibition, Radiance and Reverie: Jewels from the Collection of Neil, which will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog co-published by the TMA and Rizzoli.

Wright champions artists whose voices have often been marginalized and has made key acquisitions for the TMA including works by Viola Frey, Joyce Scott and Elizabeth Talford Scott, Katsuyo Aoki, Wangechi Mutu, Claire Falkenstein, Sibylle Peretti, Amber Cowan, Olga de Amaral, Lenore Tawney, artists represented in the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and Monir Farmanfarmaian, the first contemporary Iranian artist to enter Toledo’s collection.

She has taught extensively on the history of glass and is a recognized scholar of the windows and mosaics of Louis Comfort Tiffany and his Studio. Her current research focuses on making connections between historic objects and contemporary makers working in craft-based mediums. She has held positions at the Blair House, The Corning Museum of Glass, Pilchuck Glass School, and Yale University Art Gallery. She received degrees in Middle East studies and in the history of decorative arts from Parsons the New School for Design and is originally from Los Angeles.