Susan Cross of MASS MoCA

Appointed Director of Curatorial Affairs

By: MOCA - Dec 01, 2025

 

Susan Cross has been appointed to the new position of Director of Curatorial Affairs at MASS MoCA following a nationwide search. 

Cross has a longstanding history and commitment to the museum, serving as Senior Curator and recently as Interim Director of Visual Arts. Coming to MASS MoCA from The Guggenheim Museum (New York), Susan joined MASS MoCA six years after the museum opened its doors, and is the museum’s longest-serving and senior-most curator.

In this role, Cross leads the museum's curatorial vision and strategy, overseeing the development and implementation of innovative exhibitions and programs that engage diverse audiences and uphold the creative freedom of artists, while supporting the museum’s curatorial, studios and fabrication teams to advance the museum's mission in close collaboration with the museum’s Director. 

“Susan brings an extraordinary breadth of experience to this position,” states Kristy Edmunds, Director of MASS MoCA. “Her curatorial practice — shaped through decades of exhibition-making, artist partnerships, institutional leadership, and deep engagement with contemporary art — is matched by her thoughtful approach to building teams and stewarding long-range curatorial strategies and aspirations. Susan has been tremendous in her contributions to MASS MoCA’s legacy and in the forward momentum she is generating for our vision ahead. She brings the qualities that define remarkable and steadfast leadership to the position as Director of Curatorial Affairs.” 

“We are in a particularly exciting moment of transformation,” adds Cross, “and I am excited to take on this larger institutional role at MASS MoCA after years of contributing to the museum’s growth. I am looking forward to working closely with Kristy to shape the ambitious vision for MASS MoCA’s next chapter, which includes committing to a future dedicated to sustainability, collaborative artistic practice, and maintaining our long held commitment to being artist-centered and community-grounded.”

At MASS MoCA, Cross has curated over 40 exhibitions, including career-defining surveys of the work of Alex Da Corte, Spencer Finch, and Cauleen Smith; major large-scale commissions by Katharina Grosse and Liz Glynn; the first solo museum exhibitions of artists such as Sarah Crowner and Allison Janae Hamilton, and noteworthy group exhibitions ranging from Ceramics in the Expanded Field to The Workers which probed currents in the field and the greater sociopolitical landscape. She has developed over 70 new commissions and published over 20 catalogues and monographs. 

Cross is the curator of the upcoming group exhibition Technologies of Relation on view at MASS MoCA beginning February 21, 2026.

About Susan Cross

Susan Cross is known for her artist-centered, collaborative curatorial practice and support for under-represented, emerging artists, as well as makers working at all stages of their careers and across all disciplines. Solo exhibitions include Elle P?rez: Intimacies, Carrie Schneider: Sphinx, Ledelle Moe: When, ERRE: THEM AND US / ELLOS Y NOSOTROS, Liz Glynn: The Archaeology of Another Possible Future, Steffani Jemison: Plant You Now, Dig You Later, Richard Nonas: The Man in the Empty Space, Liz Deschenes: Gallery 4.1.1, Darren Waterston: Filthy Lucre (which traveled to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London), Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly, Simon Starling: The Nanjing Particles and Spencer Finch: What Time is it on the Sun?. Group exhibitions include Ceramics in the Expanded Field, The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night, In the Abstract, The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor, Invisible Cities, The Workers: Precarity/Invisibility/Mobility (co-curated with Carla Herrera-Prats), and Material World. Cross has produced many exhibition catalogs and edited the first monographs on Da Corte, Crowner, ERRE, Finch, and Glynn and is the co-editor of Sol LeWitt: 100 Views. Previously, she was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, organizing exhibitions in New York, Bilbao, Venice and Berlin. She has taught at Williams College and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and has mentored a dozen young curators through a unique extended internship and exhibition program at MASS MoCA in collaboration with the Clark Art Institute and Williams College Graduate Program. She received an MA from Williams College and was a 2019 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership founded by Agnes Gund and Elizabeth Easton.