Holly Hotchner

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Holly Hotchner is the Director of the Museum of Arts & Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) in New York City, appointed by the Museum’s Board of Governors in 1996. Under her leadership, the Museum is building a new, 58,000 square foot home at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan, scheduled to open in September 2008.

Hotchner, with a distinguished museum career of more than 30 years, serves on numerous panels for government funding of the arts, and as a juror for exhibitions and for artists’ awards.

During her tenure, Hotchner has increased the Museum’s operating funds and endowment, and intensified exhibition programming and outreach. She has co-organized a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions at the Museum with accompanying catalogues, including Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting; the series on contemporary Native American art, Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation; Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor; Corporal Identity–Body Language; Beatrice Wood: A Centennial Tribute; 4 Acts in Glass; Art & Industry: 20th Century Porcelain from Sevres; Defining Craft I: Collecting for the New Millennium; and Venetian Glass: 20th Century Italian Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection.

Prior to her present position, Hotchner served as Director of the New York Historical Society’s Museum from 1988-1995. Her responsibilities included: restructuring the administration of the museum, overseeing a staff of 40, participating in raising more than $40 million for the institution’s collections, education programs and general operations, and managing a capital improvement program for the museum’s facilities. From 1984-1988 she was the Chief Conservator at the Historical Society, where she led a new program to enhance the care and cataloguing of the museum’s 1.5 million-object collection.

Before joining the New York Historical Society, Hotchner was a Conservation Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and also held positions at The Tate Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Hotchner has an M.A. in Art History and a certificate of conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and a B.A. in Art History and Studio Art from Trinity College.

Hotchner’s entrepreneurial talents came into play when she established Holly Hotchner Fine Arts Management, which provided collections management, cataloguing and conservation services to individuals and corporations, and established the museum division of Audio Arts.