Thomas P. Campbell Biography

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's ninth director is Thomas P. Campbell, Ph.D. On September 9, 2008, he was chosen Director and CEO after spending fourteen years as a curator at the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, specializing in tapestries. For fourteen years, Campbell had been employed in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum, progressively moving up the curatorial ladder to become Assistant Curator (1995–1997, Associate Curator (1997–2003), and Curator (2003 to December 2008). He created and oversaw the significant exhibitions Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002) and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, both of which featured tapestries as well as other works of art including paintings, prints, and drawings. The 2002 exhibition earned Apollo magazine's "Exhibition of the Year" award, and the College Art Association's Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award for outstanding exhibition catalog in the history of art was given to the publication (2003) He has also held the position of Supervising Curator of The Antonio Ratti Textile Center, one of the world's foremost centers for textile studies and home to the Museum's extensive collection of 36,000 textiles, since shortly after joining the institution. At universities and museums in the United States and overseas, Campbell has given numerous lectures and classes on European court patronage and the relationship of tapestries to other art forms to both academics and the general public. He has written extensively on the topic of historical textiles in Europe and how they relate to other types of art from the same era. Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court is his most recent book, which was published in 2007 by Yale University Press. He has also published numerous articles in prestigious scholarly journals like Burlington Magazine, Apollo Magazine, Studies in the Decorative Arts, and Gazette des Beaux-Arts. He has received honors and grants, such as the Iris Foundation Award (Bard Graduate Center), given to a researcher in the middle of their career who has made excellent contributions to the study of decorative arts (2003). Campbell was raised in Cambridge, England, where he attended The Perse School. He was born in Singapore and earned his B.A. in English language and literature from the University of Oxford in 1984. The following year, in 1985, he received a diploma from Christie's Fine and Decorative Arts course in London. He learned how much of the tapestry medium's significant contribution to European art and propaganda had been forgotten by conventional art history while pursuing his Master's degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1987. He sought to change this in the years that followed by founding the Franses Tapestry Archive in London (1987–1994), which today houses more than 120,000 photographs and is the largest and most current global information source on European tapestries and figurative textiles. His early studies on the art and culture of King Henry VIII's court led to numerous ground-breaking research publications and a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute (1999). Dr. Campbell, his wife, and their two children Honor and Charles reside in Manhattan.

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