Lucy Oakley

Lucy Oakley is Head of Education and Programs Emerita at New York University’s Grey Art Museum, where she worked on more than 70 exhibitions. She has led over a dozen walking tours for the New-York Historical Society, exploring New York City’s historic neighborhoods, monuments, and public parks. Currently she serves on the Advisory Council of Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology.

Among museum exhibitions she has curated are Unfaded Pageant: Edwin Austin Abbey’s Shakespearean Subjects, which was based on her PhD dissertation in art history at Columbia and was on view at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery (1995), and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her companion exhibition of illustrated editions of Shakespeare’s plays was seen at Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

She has also curated exhibitions for the Grey and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, and taught at NYU, Hunter College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Columbia. Her scholarly essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of books and periodicals including the Burlington Magazine and the Metropolitan Museum Journal.

Before moving to the Grey, she was a research associate in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she worked on major exhibitions of works by Manet and Degas, among other projects. A former editor-in-chief of caa.reviews, the College Art Association’s online review journal, she also served on the founding editorial board of 19c Art Worldwide, a pioneering web-based scholarly journal.