Leadership

At the Corcoran, we focus on combining creativity, empathy and innovation to connect our creative practice to the greater good. Our leadership embodies these principles.

MEET OUR DIRECTORS

Laura Schiavo is the Director of Columbian College's Corcoran School of the Arts and Design as of July, 2026. Before joining the Museum Studies faculty in 2009, Professor Schiavo, Ph.D. worked in museums in the DC area, including the City Museum, Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, and the National Building Museum, where she curated Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s. Professor Schiavo is currently working on an initiative to address the vital issue of the role of Museum Studies programs in the lack of racial, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity in the museum profession.

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Anna Jayne Kimmel is the Deputy Director of Columbian College's Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. She is a performance studies scholar invested in the intersection of legal humanities and dance studies, with particular attention to race/coloniality and bodily scrutiny as grounded through francophone histories. This focus extends across historical and contemporary themes of policing, capture, and detainment and motivates scholarship in First Amendment rights, broadly reimagined.

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