Nancy Hall-Duncan has enjoyed a distinguished career curating and writing on 20th and 21st century art, photography and fashion. She has published extensively in these fields, writing nearly thirty books and catalogs that have been published in four languages. Her groundbreaking 1978 book The History of Fashion Photography, winner of the Grand Prix from the Musée Français de la Photographie, was the first full-scale attempt to place fashion in its true relation to art history as a whole.

Hall-Duncan is an art historian trained at the N.Y.U. Institute of Fine Arts. As Senior Curator of Art at the Bruce Museum and Associate Curator at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, she has curated over seventy exhibitions on a broad range of topics—from surrealism, the American avant-garde, and fakes and forgeries to cutting-edge art and numerous topics in photography, many accompanied by well-researched and illuminating publications. The nearly thirty books and catalogues she has written are detailed on this website.

Hall-Duncan’s publications display an astonishing range of subjects in art and photography. Her expertise in photography includes both curating photography exhibitions and writing books, catalogs and articles in the field. Her exhibitions include The History of Fashion Photography, whose award-winning catalog is the definitive work on the subject, Photographic Surrealism, Photographic Truth, Man Ray’s Paris Portraits, and Picture Perfect: Masterworks of Photography from the Hochberg-Mattis Collection. She was one of the first to include photography on a par with painting in shows such as The Surrealist Vision: Europe and the Americas. Hall-Duncan has also curated numerous one-person exhibitions on such diverse photographers as Eli Reed, Linda McCartney and Hiroshi Sugimoto and worked with many of the great photographers of our time, including Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton and Deborah Turbeville.

Hall-Duncan has appeared on CNN, National Public Radio, Radio Free Europe and other TV and radio venues and has received numerous awards for her work, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, the Dedaleus Foundation and Cleveland Foundation. She has lectured at numerous institutions, including as the lead speaker at Irving Penn at the Intersection of Art, Fashion and Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and in 2024 she will be the featured speaker at the Costume and Textile Society at the Wadsworth Athaneum, Hartford, Connecticut.

View Nancy Hall-Duncan’s CV