Thomas P. Campbell

Thomas P. Campbell, PhD (born 1962), is the ninth director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere. After fourteen years as a curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, specialising in tapestries, he was elected Director and CEO on 9 September 2008.

Born in Singapore and raised in Cambridge, England, where he attended The Perse School, Campbell received his BA in English language and literature at New College, Oxford in 1984, followed by a Diploma from Christie's Fine and Decorative Arts course, London, in 1985. While studying for his master's degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1987), he discovered the extent to which mainstream art history had overlooked the major role that the tapestry medium played in European art and propaganda. During the following years, he worked to rectify this by creating the Franses Tapestry Archive in London (1987–94), which, with more than 120,000 images, is the largest and most up-to-date information resource on European tapestries and figurative textiles in the world. His early research culminated in several groundbreaking research articles and a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (1999) on the art and culture of King Henry VIII's court.

Campbell had worked in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts for fourteen years, rising steadily through the curatorial ranks as Assistant Curator (1995–97), Associate Curator (1997–2003), and Curator (2003 to December 2008). During this time, he conceived and organised the major exhibitions Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002) and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (New York, 2007; Palacio Real, Madrid, spring 2008), both of which incorporated drawings, paintings, and prints, as well as tapestries, and received widespread acclaim. The 2002 exhibition was named "Exhibition of the Year" by Apollo magazine and its catalogue won the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award (College Art Association) for distinguished exhibition catalogue in the history of art (2003) Since shortly after his arrival at the Museum, he also served as Supervising Curator of The Antonio Ratti Textile Center, which houses the Museum's encyclopaedic collection of 36,000 textiles and is one of the preeminent centres of textile studies in the world.

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