Lynn Rother rejoined The Museum of Modern Art in 2024 as its first Curator for Provenance. Recognized internationally for her expertise in 20th-century provenance, art market analysis, and collection histories, she provides strategic direction for MoMA’s provenance research endeavors and amplifies their impact through curation, digital cataloguing, and publications.
Since 2008, Rother has shaped the evolving discipline of provenance research by bridging museum practice, academic scholarship, and data science to enable a broader understanding of the social lives of art objects on both micro and macro levels. In 2019, she founded the Provenance Lab at Leuphana University, where she holds a prestigious Lichtenberg professorship, which has facilitated international collaborations on publishing and structuring linked open data for museum objects. During her time at MoMA (2015–2019) and the State Museums of Berlin (2008–2014), she pioneered methods for provenance research on inadequately documented objects within vast institutional collections and investigated hundreds of archives— including bank, military and police repositories—to uncover long-overlooked histories. Building on her training in art history, economics, and law, and her doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin, her award-winning 2017 book Kunst durch Kredit explored how art was used as financial collateral during the Weimar era and the Nazi regime.
Rother’s recent scholarship, appearing in peer-reviewed journals and industry publications,focuses primarily on the future of provenance, informing museum practices and cultural policy decisions internationally. Her work has received major support, including grants from the Volkswagen and Getty Foundations; she also won the Humanities International prize for outstanding German-speaking research in the humanities, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the German Federal Foreign Office. Rother also serves on numerous advisory, funding, and steering committees throughout museums, archives, and universities in both Europe and the United States.