Clare Davies is the associate curator of modern and contemporary art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Davies joined the museum in 2015 as the first curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, specialising in art from the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey. Since then, she has built the foundations of The Met’s collection holdings in these areas, acquiring major works from across the region. She curated the first U.S. retrospective of Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani, titled Siah Armajani: Follow This Line, at the Met Breuer and the Walker Art Center in 2018 and 2019.
She was a co-curator alongside Kim Benzel of the exhibition Rayyane Tabet: Alien Property (2019–2021). This exhibition dealt with questions of provenance and the history of museum collecting in the Middle East. In 2022, she curated the first comprehensive exhibition of paintings by Louise Bourgeois (Louise Bourgeois: Paintings) at The Met and the New Orleans Museum of Art. She holds a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and devoted her dissertation to thinking through the methodological demands of the colonial and postcolonial site on art history in a study of 19th and 20th-century art in Egypt.
