A conversation with Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator Kim Benzel in the context of the exhibition "Adornment: Beauty and Power of the Inanimate"
Kim Benzel is Curator in Charge of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since starting at the Museum in 1990, she has worked on numerous exhibitions and related publications—such as The Royal City of Susa, Assyrian Origins, Art and Empire, Beyond Babylon, Hidden Treasures from Afghanistan and Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. In addition to her contributions to Metropolitan Museum exhibition catalogs, Kim has published several articles on the jewelry arts of the ancient Near East and wrote and produced, along with Yelena Rakic and Sarah Graff from our Department, a much-needed resource guide on the ancient Near East for K-12 teachers. Kim holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University in New York, for which she wrote a dissertation on the material and technological agency of third millennium B.C. jewelry from the so-called Royal Cemetery at Ur in southern Mesopotamia. Before embarking on a career in art history, Kim studied goldsmithing at the Kulicke-Stark Academy in New York, where she specialized in techniques and methods used in antiquity and acquired the technological expertise that now informs so much of her art historical research. Kim has participated in several archaeological excavations, primarily at sites in Syria such as Til Barsip/Tell Ahmar and Umm el-Marra, and regularly teaches the ancient Near East sections of the Barnard College Introduction to Art History survey course, as well as the ancient Near East portion of the Curatorial Studies course offered by the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
