Thelma Golden served as the Center's exhibitions panel chair in 2013. She has been the director and chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem since 2000, focusing the museum around sharing the history of collecting and art-making in Harlem and in all corners of the African Diaspora. Her many exhibitions there include Chris Ofili: Afro Muses 1995–2005, harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor, Black Romantic, and Isaac Julien: Vagabondia. Before her appointment, she was the special projects curator for Peter and Eileen Norton, contemporary art collectors in Los Angeles. Golden began her career as a curator just four years after college at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where she spent most of the 1990s. She was a co-curator of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, a landmark show that featured overtly political art by many nonwhite, female and openly gay artists. Her 1994 exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in American Art, a multimedia show that was controversial at the time, established Golden's reputation as a groundbreaking curator. She has taught and lectured at institutions such as Columbia University, Yale University and the Royal College of Art in London, and has contributed essays to publications about Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Bill T. Jones, Kara Walker, and Glenn Ligon. Golden is also a contributor to two Center publications: Curating Now, published in 2001, and What Makes a Great Exhibition?, published in 2006.
