Paula Bradstreet Richter, Curator-at-Large

Paula Bradstreet Richter specializes in fashion and textiles, American decorative arts and New England history and culture. She has served as the curator, co-curator or coordinating curator for over a dozen exhibitions including: The Salem Witch Trials: Restoring Justice; Made It: Women Who Revolutionized Fashion; The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming; Wedded Bliss: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony; Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel; and American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790–1840, among others.

Richter has also served on curatorial and exhibitions teams making contributions to 30 changing and traveling exhibitions and gallery installations at the Peabody Essex Museum including the inaugural installation and rotations of the Fashion & Design Gallery; Transforming Tradition: Arts of New England; Salem Stories; Empresses of China’s Forbidden City; and Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style, to name a few.

Richter is a contributing author to exhibition publications including: The Women Who Revolutionized Fashion: 250 Years of Design (2020); Peabody Essex Museum Guide (2020); Wedded Bliss: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony (2008); Painted with Thread the Art of American Embroidery (2001); Stitching A Legacy: American Needlework: Projects and Stories (2001). She was a contributing author to the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation project’s publication, Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth (2009).

Richter previously worked for the Cape Ann Historical Association, the Sargent House Museum and Landmark College. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, she lectures on American textiles and fashion and New England decorative arts and has published over a dozen articles and papers on related topics. Richter is a member of the Textile Society of America (TSA); the Costume Society of America (CSA) and the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC).