Ann Van Devanter Townsend, Founder and Chairman of the Trust for Museum Exhibition, has more than thirty years’ experience in the visual arts as a writer, curator, arts administrator and organizer of cultural initiatives and museum exhibitions, including over forty traveling exhibitions.

In 1984, Mrs. Townsend performed a feasibility study for the establishment of national and international traveling exhibitions service for museums worldwide, which resulted in the establishment of TME in 1985 as a not-for-profit corporation. TME either has organized or is currently organizing fine arts museum exhibitions in 50 United States and with 20 countries abroad on 6 continents. TME exhibitions are scheduled into 2009.

Townsend’s work as Guest Curator for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; the Indianapolis Museum, the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn; the Museum of Modern Art, Belgrade; the National Museum, Warsaw; and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, has been acclaimed by both the press and professionals in the field. As Guest Curator at The Baltimore Museum of Art from 1971-1977, she was responsible, among other projects, for organizing the official U.S. Bicentennial Exhibition of American Paintings sent to Eastern and Europe in 1976.

As U.S Commissioner in 1977 and 1978, Mrs. Townsend organized the U.S. entry for the International Festival of Painting, Cagnes-sur-Mer and Paris. As Director of Cultural Affairs for Chevy Chase Savings and Loan, Mrs. Townsend conceived the adaptive re-use of two historic housed: one as a museum; the other, Strathmore Hall, as the performing and visual arts center for Montgomery County, Maryland, and raised funds to launch these projects. At the National Endowment for the Arts where she was Director of Special Partnership projects from 1980 to 1982, she established programs to increase awareness in the private sector of the economic impact of the arts.

Mrs. Townsend is the co-author with Alfred Frankenstein of Self-Portraits of American Artists 1670-1973, and author of Anywhere So Long As There Be Freedom: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, His Family and His Maryland and Two Hundred Years of American Painting. She has contributed articles to Antiques Magazine, Art in America and Art/World. As a resource for the United States Information Agency and American Embassies abroad, she has lectured at museums, universities and art academies in Eastern and Western Europe. Mrs. Townsend also designed and taught The Art of Connoisseurship for Goucher College and has taught workshops on marketing arts organizations.

Mrs. Townsend holds a B.A. in International Relations from Brown University and an M.A. in Art History from the George Washington University. She was also awarded a fellowship in International Economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studied. She is a member of the Sulgrave Club of Washington, D.C. and of the Cosmos Club, also of Washington, D.C.

Ann Van Devanter Townsend

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