Curatorial profile

Daniel Finamore, Associate Director - Exhibitions, The Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History

Daniel Finamore has organized more than 15 exhibitions of American and European painting and decorative arts at PEM and in doing so has received grants from a diverse range of funders for his research and exhibition projects, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. In his role as Associate Director of Exhibitions, Finamore identifies and develops exhibition strategies that broaden our existing visitorship to include new and more diverse audiences.

Finamore holds a BA from Vassar College where he studied Anthropology and Art History, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Boston University where he studied Archaeology. He has conducted extensive archaeological field research in Belize and elsewhere, and was awarded a prize from the Society of American Archaeology for an outstanding doctoral dissertation. Finamore has written over 40 articles and chapters for academic and popular publications, and is the author and/or editor of six books, including Capturing Poseidon: Photographic Encounters with the Sea, Maritime History as World History and Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea. He curated the 2017 traveling exhibition Ocean Liners: Glamour, Speed, and Style, which was co-organized with the Victoria & Albert Museum. More recently, he served as co-curator for the 2021 summer headlining exhibition, In American Waters: The Sea in American Painting, which showcased the transformative power of the sea in American life.

Finamore is also a director of the Institute for Global Maritime Studies, an honorary member of the Salem Marine Society and has served on the executive council of the International Congress of Maritime Museums, the U.S. National Committee of the Census of Marine Life and as a director of the Council of American Maritime Museums. He was a 2011 Fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

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