Leeann Ream is a curator, art historian, museologist, and PhD student specializing in art of the United States. Her scholarship centers conceptions of labor and fluid understandings of American identity. Ream’s research frequently refers to oral tradition, popular literature, folk practices, labor organization and protest, and object-based research. Her master’s thesis, Labor on Display: The Exhibition of U.S. Art Objects and the Museum Labor Unionization Movement investigates how the growing trend toward unionization in U.S. art museums impacted interpretation of American art objects depicting labor.

Most recently, Ream served as the Cahoon Museum of American Art’s first dedicated curator where she curated exhibitions of American art, craft, and material culture from the Colonial to contemporary periods, managed exhibitions, oversaw the permanent collection and archive, secured acquisitions, and spearheaded crucial policy initiatives in collections management and disaster mitigation.

Her recent exhibitions include Pressing Editions: American Labor in Print, Rockwell Kent: A Force of Nature, Stave & Cane: Nantucket Baskets co-curated with John Kaminski, Taverns to Trades: American Folk Art Signs, and the traveling exhibition Sailors Valentines: Maritime Art from the Heart. She has presented original papers at The Newberry Library and The Inclusive Museum, published articles for the American Art Review, Vistas: A Journal of Art, History, Science and Culture, and others, and held fellowships with the New England Museums Association, the Center for Collections Care at Beloit College, and Independent Curators International.

MA, Museum and Exhibition Studies, University of Illinois Chicago, 2023

BFA, Studio Art, Bowling Green State University, 2019 


Advisor: Dr. Erin Pauwles