Suzanne Delehanty Appointed Director of Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Suzanne Delehanty, founding director of the Miami Art Museum and currently head of an independent arts consultant service, has been named director of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.  Delehanty will be become director-elect on Jan. 1, and will assume the full directorship of the museum on April 1. Her appointment follows a national search and consultation with arts scholars, professionals, and administrators from the university and nationally.

An internationally known museum leader, Delehanty comes to Rutgers with an outstanding record of achievements in the museum field and a reputation for curatorial and managerial excellence. Her ten-year appointment, 1995-2005, at the Miami Art Museum (MAM) led to the transformation of what was the Center for the Fine Arts, a non-collecting space, into Miami’s flagship art museum. Among her accomplishments at MAM, she established a collection of international art of the 20th and 21st centuries, developed extensive educational outreach to the community, and secured a waterfront site and funds for an expanded new facility. 

She previously served as the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston 1989-1993; the Neuberger Museum at the State University of New York at Purchase, 1978-1988; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1971-1978. Her firm, Suzanne Delehanty LLC, provides strategic planning and management for initiatives that bring together art, artists, and communities.

 “I am extremely pleased that Suzanne Delehanty will bring her considerable experience to the Zimmerli and to Rutgers,” said Rutgers President Richard L. McCormick. “She has a track record of reaching beyond the borders of the institutions in which she has worked to bring in new audiences for art and new supporters for the museums.”

Delehanty holds a B.A. in art history from Skidmore College and has pursued graduate studies in the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has served on a number of panels for the arts, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the General Services Administration and the Texas and Florida arts councils.  She is a member of the advisory council for the PBS series, “Art for the Twenty-first Century,” is on the board of directors of the Museums of Florida History and has been a member of the host committee for ArtBasel/Miami Beach since 2000.

Established in 1766, Rutgers is America’s eighth oldest institution of higher learning and one of the nation’s premier public research universities. The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum on the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is one of the largest and most distinguished university-based museums in the nation. It houses more than 55,000 works, including the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union and rich holdings of 19th-century French prints and drawings and American art.