Lydia Mullin is Manager of Collection Galleries in the Department of Curatorial Affairs, where she works across curatorial departments and with Museum leadership to shape long-term strategy for MoMA’s rotating collection presentation program. She oversees the planning and realization of dozens of new collection-based projects across the Museum’s galleries, public spaces, and Sculpture Garden each year, including the semiannual First Look series. She also supports research projects, institutional collaborations, events, and other initiatives related to the collection. Mullin serves on several committees and working groups at the Museum, and is a regular participant in the Hyundai Card Curatorial Exchange Program in Seoul.
Since joining MoMA in 2018 as a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Mullin has contributed to a wide range of exhibitions, acquisitions, publications, and research initiatives. Her most recent exhibition, co-organized with Starr Figura, is American Folk Art: Revisiting the Collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (2026), which was accompanied by a co-authored catalogue. Her other curatorial projects at MoMA include American Idioms (2025–ongoing), Post-Atomic Abstraction (2024–ongoing), Destination Unknown (2025–ongoing, organized with Stuart Comer), Plaster (2023–24, with Cara Manes), 1948 (2023), Jennifer Bartlett’s Rhapsody (2023, with Cara Manes), Intimate Visions (2022–ongoing), Susan Rothenberg (2022, with Cara Manes), Francis Bacon (2022), and Mythical Creatures and Radical Abstractions (2022). She was the recipient of the Ann and Lee Tenenbaum Award in 2026 and the Bernhard-Cahill Award in 2022.
Mullin holds a BA in art history from the University of Chicago. She is currently a student in the PhD program in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studies American and German art through the lenses of craft, pedagogy, economy, and folklore.