Russell Lord


Russell Lord is an American writer and curator working in the field of photography. He is the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at the New Orleans Museum of Art, a position he assumed in October 2011.

Life and Work

Lord was born and raised in Massachusetts and Virginia. He received a B.A. in Art History and French from James Madison University in 2000, and an M.Phil. in Art History from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York in 2009. His graduate work focused on 19th Century French and British photography and its relationship to printmaking.
Prior to his graduate work, Lord worked at the Yale University Art Gallery in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs from 2000-2003. During that time he coordinated the production of a major monograph on photographer Emmet Gowin’s aerial work, .
While enrolled as a graduate student, Lord was awarded a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship to continue research on his doctoral dissertation and participate in the activities of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Photographs. During the course of the two-year fellowship, he researched the Met's collection of early photography, and presented excerpts from two chapters of his dissertation. Lord organized an exhibition for the Johnson Galleries at the Met and assisted Malcolm Daniel on the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand.
In 2011, Lord accepted the position of "Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings" at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Since arriving at the museum, Lord has organized dozens of exhibitions on historic and contemporary photographs, prints, and drawings, working with artists such as Willie Birch, Edward Burtynsky, Lee Friedlander, Dawn Dedeaux, Vera Lutter, and more. In conjunction with these exhibitions, Lord organized and participated in a variety of programs, including interviewing Pulitzer Prize winning writer Tony Kushner about his work on the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln.
In 2013, Lord organized Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument, an exhibition about the process behind Gordon Parks’ first photographic essay for LIFE magazine. The exhibition originated at NOMA then traveled to five other venues: The Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley.
During his time at NOMA, Lord has increased the museum's photography collection by over 30%, bringing the collection’s total to around 12,000 works. Along with museum Director Susan M. Taylor, Lord helped organize the creation and endowment in 2013 of the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Pailet Gallery, a gallery dedicated to photographic works on paper. In 2018, the photography department was promised a donation of 1,300 photographs from the collection of Tina Freeman by artists such as Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Irving Penn, and Alfred Stieglitz. This donation was hailed as the “largest and most significant single gift of photographs in the institution’s history.”
In 2018, Lord published Looking Again: Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art in conjunction with Aperture and the New Orleans Museum of Art. The book, a survey of the museum's photography collection, examines 131 photographic objects, many of which "actively embraced curious connection to death and its unique capacity to simultaneously record reality and warp it."
In 2019, Lord secured another major gift for the photography department, when Del and Ginger Hall established a fund to support the department’s activities. As Ginger Hall explained, “ nurtured a relationship that’s helped us grow and consider ways we might inspire others.” Also that year, In 2019, Lord was a visiting instructor at the University of New Orleans, teaching a class on the history of photography and curatorial practice.
Lord serves on the advisory board of , and is an at-large board member of the . He lives in New Orleans with his wife and two children.

Selected Exhibitions Curated by Lord