As deputy curatorial director and head of the Textiles department at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Matilda McQuaid proposes and organizes national and international exhibitions and publications and oversees one of the premier textile collections in the world—including more than 30,000 textiles produced over 2,000 years, beginning with the Han Dynasty of China.

Since joining Cooper-Hewitt in 2001 as the exhibitions curator and head of the Textiles department, McQuaid has curated a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions including Josef + Anni Albers: Designs for Living (2004) and Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance (2005). Currently, McQuaid is playing a lead role in the creation of the new Online National Design Museum, and will be leading an exhibition on contemporary Chinese architecture scheduled for 2008.

McQuaid came to Cooper-Hewitt after a 15-year tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she began as a curatorial assistant in 1987 and eventually became associate curator in 1995. At MoMA, she curated more than 30 exhibitions, including Shigeru Ban: A Paper Arch, Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles, and Lilly Reich: Designer and Architect.

She is an accomplished author and editor on art, architecture, and design, with many books and articles to her credit, including Shigeru Ban Architect (Phaidon Press, 2003); Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art (The Museum of Modern Art, 2002); Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles (The Museum of Modern Art, 1998); Architecture: A Place for Women (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); and, Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).

McQuaid holds a master’s degree in architectural history from the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s degree in art history from Bowdoin College.