Kim Sajet

Kim Sajet is a museum director, art historian, and writer whose work explores the ways portraits can illuminate history—and how the faces we choose to remember shape our understanding of the past.

She is the Donald and Donna Baumgartner Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum and previously served for twelve years as director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. During her tenure, she helped expand the Gallery’s approach to portraiture and oversaw exhibitions, acquisitions, and programs that brought together art, biography, and American history.

Born in Nigeria to Dutch parents, raised in Australia, and based in the United States for more than three decades, Sajet brings an international perspective to the study of American culture. She holds degrees from the University of Melbourne, Bryn Mawr College, and Georgetown University, where her doctoral research became the foundation for Facing New Freedoms: Emily Howland’s Photograph Album and the Struggle to Remake America.

Her research focuses on portraiture, photography, biography, and the people—often overlooked—who helped shape American history. Facing New Freedoms grew from her fascination with a remarkable nineteenth-century photograph album assembled by Quaker abolitionist, educator, and suffragist Emily Howland. Through its photographs and the lives behind them, Sajet explores a generation confronting some of the defining questions of the nineteenth century: slavery and freedom, race and citizenship, education, women’s rights, and who had the power to be seen and remembered.