The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens has appointed Diva Zumaya as the new associate curator of European art. Zumaya comes to The Huntington from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she currently holds the position of associate curator of European painting and sculpture. She has been a member of CODART since 2020.
As the associate curator of European art, Zumaya will help develop and curate exhibitions, advise on new art acquisitions, and secure loans, among other activities, building on The Huntington’s signature strengths while also considering the connections among Europe, the Americas, and Asia. She will join The Huntington on 3 June.
Diva Zumaya, associate curator of European art
Zumaya is a specialist in early modern European art history and brings a cross-disciplinary approach to her curatorial practice. At LACMA, she began as a Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellow in 2018, became staff assistant curator of European painting and sculpture in 2020, and was named the associate curator in 2023. She organized The World Made Wondrous: The Dutch Collector’s Cabinet and the Politics of Possession (2023-2024), an exhibition that brought together highlights from across curatorial departments in new juxtapositions and groupings, including works of art from the Middle East, Chinese art, costume and textiles, decorative arts and design, Egyptian art, Japanese art, prints and drawings, and South and Southeast Asian art.
Zumaya earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from UC Santa Barbara and a B.A. in art history from Mills College. Her dissertation We are bent, not broken by the waves: Clandestine Devotion and Community Perseverance in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Catholic Visual Culture examined how seventeenth-century Dutch Catholics deployed art to renew their sense of collective identity. She has presented her research and given lectures at conferences and universities nationally. Her essays will be included in the forthcoming publication Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures (Leiden: Brill).