Daphne Anderson Deeds has distinguished herself through many curatorial positions, including Senior Curator of the Yale University Art Gallery, Assistant Curator of the David and Alfred Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Chief Curator of the Sheldon Art Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Executive Director of the Weir Art Center in Wilton, Connecticut. She has written dozens of essays focused on artists and movements within the history of modernism and contemporary art.
As an undergraduate she won academic awards in art history from the University of California (Berkeley) and as a graduate student from the University of Chicago. Early in her career she served as a guest curator and lecturer at many institutions, including the Tucson Museum of Art, the University of Arizona Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona State University, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. She was elected an Associate Fellow of Yale’s Jonathan Edwards College where she curated several exhibitions. Daphne is also a long-time member of ArtTable, an organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of women in the visual arts.
Daphne won the Merit Award from the Alliance of American Museums for her book, Of Time and the City: American Modernism from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery (1990), which was published for a nationally traveling exhibition.
It is from this deep curatorial background that Daphne grew her consultancy focused on legacy-building strategies. Among her institutional clients are Yale University, the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford), the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), the Lyman Allyn Art Museum (New London), and the Kaneko (Omaha). Among the contemporary artists she has advised are the Komar and Melamid collaborative and Squeak Carnwath. Her estate collection projects include those of Paul Cadmus, Robert Hamilton, Fay Lansner, Alexander Rutsch, and Robert and Dorothy Mitchum.
