Leslie Anne Anderson

Since 2019, Leslie has served Seattle’s National Nordic Museum in a critical capacity—first, as Director of Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs and later as, Chief Curator (Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs), responsible for guiding the museum’s creative and programmatic vision. Her extensive experience working in museums, includes the organization of dozens of exhibitions, the production of over 600 programs from concerts to film festivals, and the direct stewardship of over 1,000 acquisitions of fine art, material culture, and archival holdings.

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Finally, she has helmed the coordination of several forward-thinking initiatives. Leslie’s business school education has complemented her museum work, which has led her to focus on creating industry-leading, financially sustainable cultural and educational experiences. Recent exhibitions and programs that she has organized or co-organized are featured in an array of publications in The Art Newspaper, The Brooklyn Rail, Forbes, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, among others. 

  

Leslie has collaborated with Sweden’s Nationalmuseum and Finland’s National Gallery, and in 2022, she traveled to Oslo with an international delegation of art experts selected by Norway’s foreign ministry. She has commissioned new work from Jónsi—vocalist for the world-famous band Sigur Rós—and organized his first art exhibition at a US museum. Additionally, she produced programs featuring Iceland’s president, ministers of Iceland and Finland, and ambassadors of Denmark, Iceland, Finland, and Norway, as well as musical artists Laufey, Jónsi, Sin Fang (of Seabear), Kjartan Holm, Dinamarca, and Tuomo & Markus. For COP26, she planned an industry-leading symposium—co-presented with the American Alliance of Museums, the International Council of Museums, and the UK’s National Museum Directors’ Council—that gathered speakers in seven countries to discuss the impact of climate change on Arctic museums.

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Previously, Leslie served as Curator of European, American, and Regional Art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, and held positions in the Curatorial and Publishing & Media Departments at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Recently, she partnered with Dr. Ethelene Whitmire (Professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison) to co-curate Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century—the Museum’s most ambitious exhibition to date, which traveled to the Chazen Museum of Art and Scandinavia House (New York). She also co-organized the first-ever exhibition of the art collective Fischersund with the artists. Featured in The Brooklyn Rail, noted art critic Gregory Volk called Fischersund: Faux Flora “one of the most innovative and compelling exhibitions I’ve experienced in a long time.” 

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Leslie is an educator whose work has appeared in both academic and popular venues. In the course of six years, she taught over 1,000 students in undergraduate introductory art history courses, as well as Baroque and 19th-century art, at Brooklyn College, Parsons School of Design, and Indianapolis University – Purdue University Indianapolis, among other institutions. Her art historical research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Journal 18, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. She has also written on the work of museums for professional and general audiences in Collections: A Journal for Museums and Archives Professionals, American Alliance of Museums Blog, The Seattle Times, and Observer.  She contributed to the AAMC Foundation Best Practices Guide for Artist Demographic Data Coordination and has served on the editorial board of the international journal Arts. 

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Leslie received the 2018 Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) Award for Excellence, First Place, an international honor presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and published in Artforum. In 2020, she received the Utah Museums Association Award for Excellence for piloting a new exhibition-making model with colleagues in museum education. 

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Leslie has held several leadership positions including her current one, a second term as a mayoral-appointed Seattle Arts Commissioner and, member of Seattle’s Public Art Advisory Committee (she served as its Chair from 2023 to 2025). She is on the board of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. In 2018, Salt Lake City’s then-Mayor Jackie Biskupski appointed her to the City’s Art Design Board. She has held positions as VP Finance and VP Events of the Seattle Gator Club, Region Chair of the University of Florida Association of Hispanic Alumni and was a member of 4Culture’s Heritage Advisory Committee. She is committed to serving her community, industry, and alma mater.

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A former Fulbright scholar and American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Leslie earned graduate degrees in art history from the City University of New York Graduate Center and the University of Florida, where she also completed a BA cum laude in history. She has earned certificates in Scandinavian languages from New York University and business management from University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. In 2023, the University of Florida Alumni Association selected Leslie for the “40 Gators Under 40” honor. Leslie is a candidate at the top-ranked Executive MBA program at Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business and will complete her third graduate degree in May 2025.