BATON ROUGE, LA.- LSU has named Jordana Pomeroy the new executive director of the Museum of Art. Pomeroy will start with the museum on July 2, pending approval of the LSU Board of Supervisors. She is replacing outgoing executive director, Tom Livesay, who retired on March 30 after being with the museum since January 2007.

“The LSU Museum of Art has infinite potential to become a major cultural destination, as well as a vital center for learning and exploration,” said Pomeroy.

Pomeroy comes to LSU after serving as chief curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. While there, she organized exhibitions ranging from “An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum” in 2003 and “Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque” in 2007, to “Nordic Cool: Hot Women Designers” in 2004 and “Pressing Ideas: Fifty Years of Women’s Lithographs from Tamarind” in 2010.

Pomeroy’s most recent exhibition, “Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and other French National Collections,” opened on Feb. 24 and received widespread media coverage by Salon.com, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

In 2008, she was selected to be one of 10 fellows in the inaugural class of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a museum management program funded by philanthropist Agnes Gund.

Pomeroy received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York. Her dissertation, “Collecting the Past to Create a Future,” focused on early 19th-century art patronage in Britain and the founding of London’s National Gallery. She has published widely on this subject thanks to a post-doctoral fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London.

Her book, “Intrepid Women: Victorian Artists Travel,” was published in 2005 by Ashgate Publishing. “Victorian and gender studies will benefit from this collection of new insights into the lives, actions and art of these intrepid women,” wrote Marion Arnold in a 2007 review.

Since 2009, Pomeroy has been a professorial lecturer in the M.A. program of the Department of Art and Museum Studies at Georgetown University, where she developed the first course on curatorial practice.

The LSU Museum of Art has been located in the Shaw Center for the Arts in downtown Baton Rouge since March 2005 after moving from the Memorial Tower on campus. The museum and its collection were established through a generous, anonymous gift to LSU in 1959 and opened as the Anglo-American Art Museum in 1962. The LSU Museum of Art offers LSU and the Baton Rouge community access to its diverse art collection, changing exhibitions, education programs and special events.

“The Museum of Art is a powerful showcase for LSU’s economic, cultural and educational impact in the region. I have no doubt that with Jordana’s leadership, the museum will become a national model of excellence,” said John Maxwell Hamilton, LSU’s executive vice chancellor & provost.