Courtney J Martin

Executive Director, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Courtney J. Martin is the Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Previously, she was the Director of the Yale Center for British Art, and Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Dia Art Foundation. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Martin worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York City. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale in 2009, and her dissertation, which examined British art and artists in the 1970s, will be published as a book. As a graduate student at the university, she contributed to the Yale Center for British Art’s exhibition Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. After receiving her doctorate, Martin conducted research and taught at Vanderbilt University as assistant professor in the History of Art department. She then joined the faculty of Brown University as assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture department, where she fostered understanding and appreciation of art, while using the work of artists to launch conversations and inspire discoveries across disciplines. In 2015, Martin joined Dia — a nonprofit organization that supports and presents exhibitions, commissions, and site-specific installations — as adjunct curator for an exhibition of the American painter Robert Ryman at Dia:Chelsea. In 2017, she became the deputy director and chief curator at Dia, where she oversaw a complex operation that includes acquisitions, exhibitions, programming, research, and publications. Martin’s numerous exhibitions include Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip... Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973-1978at Tate Britain (2012) and Minimal Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contemporary Art at Rønnebæksholm in Denmark (co-curated 2014). From 2008- 2015, she co-led a research project on critic Lawrence Alloway at the Getty Research Institute and is co-editor of Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty Publications, 2015). In 2015, she curated Robert Ryman at Dia. She is the editor of Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016). Martin’s fellowships include, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley; fellow at the Getty Research Institute; and a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow. In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She was a participant in the Center for Curatorial Leadership’s fellowship in 2019.