Paula J Birnbaum PhD

Paula J. Birnbaum is the inaugural Ann Getty Endowed Chair and Academic Director of the Museum Studies Master of Arts Program and Professor of Arts History and Museum Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary art and holds a doctorate in Art History from Bryn Mawr College. Professor Birnbaum is a former Fulbright Scholar and fellow at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. 

​

Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in relationship to gender and sexuality, as well as institutional and social politics in museum exhibitions. She has completed three books: Sculpting a Life: Chana Orloff Between Paris and Tel Aviv (Brandeis University Press, 2023); Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities (Ashgate/Routledge, 2011; 2016), and a co-edited anthology (with Anna Novakov), Essays on Women's Artistic and Cultural Contributions 1919-1939 (Edwin Mellen). Her publications contribute to feminist scholarship within the fields of art history, museum studies, gender studies, and Jewish studies, with recent articles ranging on topics from feminist art in Israel to the global street art movement. She has lectured internationally, with recent presentations in Paris at the at the Musée d'Orsay, the Institut Giacometti and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, University of Johannesburg, Tel Aviv University, and the 34th World Congress of Art History, Beijing.

​