Kelly Baum is the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has worked since 2015. Prior to that, she held curatorial positions at the Princeton University Art Museum (2007–15), the Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas at Austin (2002–2007), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2000–2002). She has organized dozens of exhibitions, including Carol Bove (2006); Nobody's Property: Art, Land, Space (2010); New Jersey as Non-Site (2013), for which she received a Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship; Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980 (2017); The Roof Garden Commission: Alicja Kwade,ParaPivot (2019); and The Facade Commission: Wangechi Mutu, The NewOnes, will free Us (2019). She also co-curated Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017 (2018) and Alice Neel: People Come First (2020). Her writing has been widely published in journals such as October and Art Journal as well as anthologies like Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2005). She received her PhD from the University of Delaware in 2005 and was a 2018 fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership.