The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has announced the appointment of Dr. Rhea L. Combs and Dr. Ellen McBreen to two major curatorial fellowships aimed at advancing research and new approaches in art scholarship.
Dr. Rhea L. Combs will serve as Senior Fellow in Contemporary and Global Art, a two-year independent fellowship funded by the Ford Foundation and The Hearthland Foundation. This role is designed to adapt through collaboration with artists, collectives, and institutions across North America, Europe, and the African diaspora. Outcomes from the fellowship may include publications, cultural events, or exhibition concepts.
Combs brings over twenty years of experience in curation and museum leadership. She most recently held the position of Director of Curatorial Affairs and Chief Curator at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery from 2021 to 2026, where she led curatorial teams, managed acquisitions strategies, oversaw exhibitions, coordinated high-profile portrait commissions, and helped secure more than $3.5 million for various projects. Her recent work includes curating “American Winners: Athletes and Entertainers that Helped Shape the Nation” (2025) and co-curating “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance” (2024–2025), collaborating with Hilton Als.
Previously, Combs was Senior Curator of Photography and Film at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. She founded its Center for African American Media Arts (CAAMA), focusing on Black visual traditions through photography and film while developing one of the country’s most comprehensive collections in this area.
Her writings have appeared in several publications including those accompanying “Amy Sherald: American Sublime.” She has served on art juries, given presentations nationwide—including at institutions such as Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Metropolitan Museum of Art—and curated exhibitions internationally.
Dr. Ellen McBreen will be the second Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies Fellow at BMA. During her fellowship she will collaborate with Katy Rothkopf—Anne and Ben Cone Director of The Ruth R. Marder Matisse Center—on research for an upcoming major Matisse exhibition catalog.
McBreen is a professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts specializing in 19th- and 20th-century European art as well as modern U.S. art history. She previously directed Wheaton’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Humanities from 2022 to 2024. Her recent works include co-authoring “Henri Matisse” (2025) with Claudine Grammont and writing “Matisse’s Sculpture: The Pinup and the Primitive” (2014). In 2017 she co-curated “Matisse in the Studio” at both Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
She has contributed essays to catalogs for museums such as Fondation Beyeler, Musée Matisse Nice, Saint Louis Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Kunsthaus Zürich; spoken at institutions including Barnes Foundation and Guggenheim Museum; and explored European avant-garde responses to African material culture through her work on “Migrating Objects” at Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection (2020).
“We are thrilled to welcome Rhea and Ellen as fellows at the BMA, as part of our vision to support new expansive scholarship in the histories of art and to create the space necessary to envision the future of museum work,” said Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director at BMA. “The BMA has long been committed to innovation, experimentation, and to upending convention in service to our communities. Providing these fellowships extends those institutional priorities and reflects our deep interest in advancing critical conversations through different collaborations and methodologies. I look forward to the rich dialogues and opportunities that emerge through these fellowships, and to learning from Rhea and Ellen as brilliant scholars.”
Founded in 1914, BMA houses more than 97,000 objects spanning multiple eras—including what it describes as the world’s largest public collection of works by Henri Matisse. The museum also features notable holdings in prints, drawings, photographs, contemporary works by diverse artists, a neoclassical building designed by John Russell Pope, two sculpture gardens, free general admission, proximity to Johns Hopkins University,and a community branch at Lexington Market.
