After an extensive, months-long national search, we are excited to announce that David Odo, director of academic and public programs, division head and research curator at the Harvard Art Museums, will become the new director of the Georgia Museum of Art beginning June 26. Odo, who will fill the shoes of recently retired director William U. Eiland, aims to build further on the museum’s legacy and mission to be accessible and engage with the public.
“I’m thrilled and honored to be joining such a talented team of colleagues at the Georgia Museum of Art. Together, we will build on a foundation of success by working closely with UGA students and campus partners to co-create the future museum through innovative research, teaching, experiential learning and public service projects,” Odo said in UGA’s announcement of the news. “I’m especially excited to work with the museum team, students and community partners to engage a greater number of Georgians throughout the state with the phenomenal resources of the museum.”
Odo brings extensive experience via research, teaching and museum leadership roles from some of the most renowned museums all over the world. According to the UGA news release:
As a visual and material anthropologist, Odo’s primary research and teaching interests are in the anthropology of art, the body in art and material culture, and the intersections of art and medicine. He is also an expert on 19th-century Japanese photography and has published and lectured widely on the subject, as well as museum pedagogy. Odo earned his D.Phil. in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Oxford and his B.A. from Columbia University in East Asian studies. He has held numerous research fellowships, including at Harvard University, the Freer and Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian Institution, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the University of Tokyo.During his tenure at Harvard, Odo established numerous initiatives that connected departments and schools across the university with the museums. These initiatives include the Ho Family Student Guide Program, which trains undergraduates from a wide variety of STEM and humanities backgrounds to lead original tours of the museum for the public. In addition, he created a program for nuclear medicine that brings physicians from Harvard Medical School and its teaching hospitals into the museum for a yearlong series of art-centered discussions.
We look forward to officially welcoming Odo to campus in person this June and we’re excited to work with him in the transition to the next phase of the Georgia Museum of Art’s legacy and history on campus, in the state of Georgia and beyond.
Want to know more about our new director? Check out his bio, his student docent program at the Harvard Art Museums and his work to connect the museum and medical professionals that was documented by the Harvard Gazette. It’s but a small slice of media features that tout and exemplify his previous work and we look forward to his arrival in late June.
Authored by:
Jessica Luton
