Ellen Miles

curator, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

Miles, chair of the department of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., will give a talk titled "Persuasion and Power: Presidential Portraits Past and Present." The talk is presented as part of the yearlong series "Visual Culture in the 21st Century," and is open to the public. Admission is free. Ellen Miles recently served as co-curator of Gilbert Stuart, an exhibition organized jointly by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery, and is co-author of the exhibition's catalogue. The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is home to several Gilbert Stuart portraits, including the famous Portrait of Thomas Jefferson and Portrait of James Madison, both painted in 1805-07. Miles is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, and earned her Ph.D. in art history at Yale University. A recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship, she was selected the Smithsonian Secretary's Distinguished Research Lecturer in 2004.