Maya Benton

Maya Benton is an independent curator based in New York City. She has organized numerous international traveling exhibitions and has held positions in museums for more than twenty-five years, including The Getty Museum, the RISD Museum, the Jewish Museum of Florence, Italy, and the Harvard University Art Museums. From 2008 to 2019, Maya was a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, where she established a major archive and organized the most widely traveling exhibitions in ICP’s history. Her award-winning catalogues, exhibitions, and research have been translated into more than a dozen languages, garnering international acclaim including features in The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Het Parool, El Pais, and The Guardian.

She recently organized Southern Rites, an exhibition of photographer and filmmaker Gillian Laub’s contemporary images of racial segregation in the American South, traveling through 2024. Maya is currently organizing three photography exhibitions that will open at venues in New York State in 2022, including Photography Now, at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She is the founder of the Jews and Photography Initiative, a non-profit collaborative of more than two hundred international curators, academics, and archivists who are interrogating the unique contribution of Jews to shaping the medium and history of photography. Her next book will be an anthology of seminal texts on Jews and photography, to be published by Aperture.

She is a graduate of Brown University, Harvard University, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Yale University.