Merry A. Foresta

Merry A. Foresta, director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative since its inception in 2000, joined the Smithsonian Institution in 1977. Working first as an assistant curator for 20th-century art at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), she was named the museum's first curator of photography in 1983 and later became the senior curator of photography for the Smithsonian's International Art Museums Division. During her tenure at the Smithsonian, Foresta built one of the world's premier collections of American photography. She has curated more than fifty exhibitions on art and photography, including Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray; Photography of Invention: Pictures of the 1980s; Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography; Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype; and American Photographs: The First Century.

As the inaugural project of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, Foresta authored At First Sight: Photography and the Smithsonian which featured a broad sampling of photographs from collections throughout the institution. She is also the author of numerous catalog essays and articles on 20th-century American art and photography, subjects on which she frequently lectures.