Elizabeth Chew, PhD

Elizabeth Chew, PhD, is senior director of museum programs and chief curator at James Madison's Montpelier in Orange, Virginia. She has overseen projects to return the story of slavery to the plantation landscape, including the exhibition The Mere Distinction of Colour, winner of six national awards, and collaborated on convening the National Summit on Teaching Slavery and its publication, Rubric of Best Practices in Descendant Engagement in the Interpretation of Slavery. As curator at Monticello for 13 years, Chew was instrumental in expanding interpretation to include women, slavery, and domestic work. She curated the exhibition ‘To Try All Things’: Monticello as Experiment and was co-curator, with Rex Ellis of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, of the exhibition Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty. Before joining the team at Montpelier, she was Betsy Main Babcock Director of the Curatorial and Education Division at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. An art historian, she has lectured, taught, and published widely on ways in which art and architectural patronage relate to gender, race, and family politics.