Elizabeth Cleland

Dr. Elizabeth Cleland

Dr. Elizabeth Cleland has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2004. As Curator in the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, she is responsible for the curation, research and acquisition of the museum’s post- medieval European textiles. She co-curated, with Adam Eaker, the major loan exhibition The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England (on view at The Met until Jan. 08, 2023).

Previously, she was lead curator of the major loan exhibition Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry (The Met 2014-15), and curated Relative Values: The Cost of Art in the Northern Renaissance (The Met, 2018-21). With the Cleveland Museum of Art, she guest-curated Renaissance Splendor: Catherine de’ Medici’s Valois Tapestries (CMA 2018- 19). She lectures and teaches regularly, and has published widely on fifteenth-, sixteenth- and twentieth-century tapestries. In addition to the award-winning catalogue to Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry, which has been translated into Dutch and French, her books include: Renaissance Splendor. Catherine de’ Medici’s Valois Tapestries (Yale, 2018), co-authored with Marjorie E. Wieseman; Tapestries from the Burrell Collection (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2017), co-authored with Lorraine Karafel; and Tapestry in the Baroque: New aspects of production and patronage (Yale, 2010), co-edited with Thomas P. Campbell.

She undertook her undergraduate and postgraduate studies (the latter as an Arts and Humanities Research Council scholar) at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She has received awards from the Ohio Museums Association (2018) and Association of Art Museum Curators (2014), and was recipient of the Leo and Julia Forchheimer Research Fellowship in 2004, and the Patricia Fay Memorial Fund scholarship in 1997. She and her husband live in New York with their daughter.