Dr. Madeleine Haddon is a curator and art historian with over fifteen years of experience in the museum sector. She now serves as Senior Curator of V&A East, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s newest campus, where she leads major curatorial projects across V&A East Storehouse and V&A East Museum, shaping ambitious interdisciplinary initiatives that reimagine how national and global histories of art, design and creativity are presented to the public. 

Recent projects include Thomas J. Price’s landmark public artwork A Place Beyond for V&A East Museum, Carrie Mae Weems’s The Long Goodbye at V&A East Museum and Es Devlin’s The Everythingists at V&A East Storehouse; co-leading the establishment of the V&A’s first Global Africa Acquisitions Group; and curating the David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse. Her curatorial and scholarly practice explores the intersections of art, race and visual culture, with particular attention to how cultural identities have been constructed, represented and contested from the nineteenth century to the present.

During the 2026 Venice Biennale, Dr. Haddon was named an Honoured Leader in Culture by the Association of Women in the Arts. She has also been recognised by ELLE UK as one of the 2026 “Culture Shifters” shaping London’s cultural landscape and was the inaugural leader featured in Marie Claire’s arts column In the Frame.

Before joining the V&A, Dr. Haddon worked as an independent curator and art historian between London and New York. Her major exhibition projects include Nuestra Casa: Rediscovering the Treasures of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library at The Hispanic Society and Matisse: The Red Studio at The Museum of Modern Art. She has held curatorial positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Frick Collection, Yale University Art Gallery and Princeton University Art Museum, and has taught at Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh.

In 2020, she worked with the directors of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Center for Curatorial Leadership to establish the CCL/Studio Museum Curators’ Forum.

Dr. Haddon’s wider leadership has included service on boards and advisory committees for organisations including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Harvard Art Museums, the Public Arts Trust of India, Photo London and the CORA Foundation.

She is currently working on a book project entitled Figures in the Frame: Black Creatives and the Making of Modern Britain. She has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues, including De Profundis: Oscar Wilde (2024); Travel, Respond, Assemble: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Betye Saar (2023), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Murillo: From Heaven to Earth (2022), Kimbell Art Museum; and The Sublime in Nature (2021).

Dr. Haddon received her PhD in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University. Her dissertation, “Local Color: Race, Gender, and Spanishness in European Painting, 1855–1927” was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in support of her research.