Andaleeb Badiee Banta is the Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art. As head of department, Banta leads the curatorial team responsible for the care, research, and display of the National Gallery’s world-class collection of over 120,000 works on paper, including prints, drawings, artists’ books and ephemera.

She is a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art of Europe with 20 years of experience working in museums. She earned her MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and her BA from Vassar College.

Banta has curated exhibitions covering periods from the Renaissance to the present day, with a focus on crafting narratives that highlight underrepresented artists and resonate with contemporary audiences, and she has pursued acquisitions that diversify the stories told in a museum setting.

Prior to her position at the National Gallery, Banta was the Senior Curator and Department Head of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she curated the critically-acclaimed exhibition “Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800,” offering an alternate narrative of pre-modern Western European art that centered the contributions women have made to all manner of artistic production.

Earlier, she was Curator of European and American Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and was Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art.

Banta has published and presented on numerous European artists of the 16th and 17th centuries. In 2017 she co-authored the exhibition catalogue Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings, which received the Alfred H. Barr Award from the College Art Association.

Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fulbright Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.