New York, NY & Virtual | ArtTable’s Annual Leadership Series | The Future of American Art Museums

Julia Halperin is an arts and culture journalist, editor, and co-founder of the Burns Halperin Report, the largest report of its kind tracking equity and representation in the art world. She is a contributor to the New York Times, the Financial Times, and W magazine, among other publications. She also serves as editor at large of CULTURED magazine and a contributing editor to The Art Newspaper. From 2017 to 2022, she was executive editor of Artnet News. She is a winner of the 2026 Rabkin Prize for visual arts journalists. 

Laura J. Allen is an interdisciplinary curator, educator, and scholar. Her museum practice focuses on historical, modern, and contemporary Native art and critical and collaborative museology through a lens of restorative justice. Her research and publications examine the visual and material culture of the Native Northwest Coast and Northeast as well as Indigenous and intercultural dress, fashion, and textile histories in the Americas. Themes in her research include material sovereignty, resurgence, colonialism, transcultural exchange, and the collection, circulation, and display of cultural objects and designs. Allen is based in Lūnaapeewáhkiing/Lenapehoking, living in Brooklyn and serving as the Curator of Native American Art and Repatriation Coordinator at Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey as well as an independent curator. She is also a visiting faculty member at Montclair State University.

Shamim M. Momin is the newly appointed Director and Chief Curator of The Bronx Museum of the Arts, who joins the Museum following over 20 years of curatorial and leadership experience at some of the nation’s premier institutions. She has served, most recently, as an independent curator and advisor in New York, following her tenure as the Director of Curatorial Affairs and Chief Curator at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle). In this role from 2018-2024, she oversaw the Curatorial, Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs departments and, as part of the Directors Team, participated in all strategic planning and organizational decision making.
As Chief Curator, Momin organized numerous exhibitions, including the museum wide group exhibition In Plain Sight, as well as major commissions by Tala Madani, Gary Simmons, Kelly Akashi, Hank Willis Thomas, Donna Huanca, Diana Al-Hadid, and others. Prior to joining the Henry, Momin was Director, Curator, and Co-founder of LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), a leading nonprofit public art organization committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects. In that role from 2008-2018, Momin organized over 100 exhibitions, projects, and programs with more than 300 artists, presented across the U.S. and internationally. Previously, Momin was an Associate Curator of Contemporary Art for twelve years at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), where she co-curated the 2004 and 2008 Whitney Biennials and oversaw the Contemporary Projects series, in addition to serving as Director of the Whitney Museum at Altria, an off-site space, where she was responsible for organizing exhibitions and commissioning more than fifty new projects by emerging artists for both solo and thematic presentations.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.