Ellen McBreen

Dr. Ellen McBreen began her new role as a Fellow at the BMA’s Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies in the fall of 2025. The two-year fellowship invites curators, researchers, and scholars to engage with the museum’s extensive holdings of modern icon Henri Matisse.

During her fellowship, McBreen will be working closely with Katy Rothkopf, the BMA’s Anne and Ben Cone Director of The Ruth R. Marder Matisse Center, on researching and contributing an essay to the catalog for a forthcoming major Matisse exhibition. McBreen’s past work, exploring how art shapes points of contact across cultural boundaries, real or imagined, will bring new perspectives to Matisse scholarship.

McBreen’s research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century art, design, and visual culture in Europe as well as 20th-century art in the U.S. She is professor of History of Art at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary art. She also recently served as the Director of the Wheaton Institute for the Interdisciplinary Humanities (2022-2024). She has written and presented extensively on Matisse. Her recent book credits include Henri Matisse (2025), a comprehensive monograph co-authored with Claudine Grammont, and Matisse’s Sculpture: The Pinup and the Primitive (2014). In 2017, McBreen co-curated Matisse in the Studio at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Royal Academy of Arts, London. She penned two chapters and co-edited the accompanying catalog of the same name. Her essays on other aspects of the artist’s practice have appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Fondation Beyeler, Musée Matisse Nice, Saint Louis Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Kunsthaus Zürich.

McBreen has been an invited speaker at the Barnes Foundation, Bruce Museum, Guggenheim Museum, and RISD Museum, among others. Her other area of scholarly focus is the European avant-garde’s reception and understanding of African material culture, which she explored as co-curator for the exhibition Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (2020) in Venice. She holds a PhD and MA from New York University and a BA from Harvard University.