SHANA LOPES

Shana Lopes, PhD, is an Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since her arrival at the museum in 2019, she has organized exhibitions on cyanotypes, the 1906 earthquake, Atget, and Wright Morris. She is the co-curator of Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, which pairs recent acquisitions with existing work from the collection, and A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, which opened March 2022. Over the past fourteen years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

By training, she is an art historian and enjoys learning about photographic projects that are both visually arresting and have a clear conceptual motivation behind them. Originality and thoughtfulness of approach is especially important to her.  While she is open to reviewing and providing feedback on a wide range of subjects, She is eager to see work that relates to identity, climate change, or communities historically under-represented by the museum. Shana is also interested in alternative processes, research-based projects, and work that blurs the boundaries between media.