Ann Sumner
Ann Sumner is an art historian, exhibition curator, author and former museum director. She is currently Visiting Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University and Chair of the Methodist Modern Art Collection.
She was the Head of Public Engagement at the University of Leeds, where she led the Public Art Programme.
She was Historic Collections Adviser at Harewood House Trust, where she led the Chippendale 300 celebrations. In 2018 she was made a Fellow of Aberystwyth University in 2018
She was the executive director of the Brontë Society, a director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, England, and the first director of the Birmingham Museums Trust, comprising the merged Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Thinktank, from 2012 until 2013.
Education
Sumner studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, and obtained a PhD in History from Newnham College, University of Cambridge.Career
She started her career at the National Portrait Gallery and has held curatorial positions at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Harewood House, and the Holburne Museum. Before her directorship at the Barber Institute, University of Birmingham, she was Head of Fine Art at National Museum Wales, for seven years. In 2007 she became Barber Professor of Fine Art and Curatorial Practice.Her specialist areas of interest are 17th-century British portraiture and miniature painting, French 19th-century painting, the art of Wales, and Public Art; she has long had an interest in art inspired by the game of lawn tennis. She contributed a chapter on International Tennis Art to the Routledge Handbook of Tennis in 2019 Her current research interests include public art by the American sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe in the 1950s and her book on Cunliffe in Manchester will be published by Manchester Metropolitan University Press in autumn 2020.
She was a founding member of the Steering Group for Pre 1900 European Paintings Specialist Subject Network, is the current Chair of the Methodist Art Collection of Modern Art, a Trustee of Leeds Art Fund, Trustee of the Museum of Bath at Work and was a member of the panel from the Leverhulme Art History Prize 2010/11, She sits on the Curatorial Advisory Group for the Ironbridge Gorge Museums and is a member of the Advisory Committee for the School of Art Gallery & Museum, Aberystwyth University. At the University of Leeds she led the Yorkshire Year of the Textile public engagement programme inspired by the rich textile heritage of the county.