David Odo, director of academic and public programs, division head and research curator at the Harvard Art Museums, has been named the next director of the Georgia Museum of Art following a national search. His appointment is effective June 26.
In his current position, Dr. Odo oversees the Harvard Art Museums’ academic and public engagement programs, including Harvard University course collaborations, student programs, public education, and community partnerships. As a member of the senior leadership team, he led planning for an institution-wide research and learning ecosystem for the museum’s recently completed five-year strategic plan and reaccreditation package.
During his tenure at Harvard, Dr. 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 year-long series of art-centered discussions.
A visual and material anthropologist, Dr. Odo researches and teaches primarily in the anthropology of art, the body in art and material culture, and the intersections of art and medicine. He has published and lectured widely as an expert on 19th-century Japanese photography as well as on museum pedagogy.
Dr. 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.