Leadership

Veronica Roberts is the John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the Cantor Arts Center. Before coming to Stanford, she was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin since 2013. At the Blanton, she curated the nationally touring exhibitions Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser, which traveled to the Cantor in 2017, and Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt. Roberts also presented projects with artists Vincent Valdez, Lenka Clayton, Donald Moffett, Susan Philipsz, Ed Ruscha and Diedrick Brackens, and co-curated an exhibition of Charles White works jointly acquired by the Blanton and Art Galleries at Black Studies. She opened the exhibition Assembly: New Acquisitions by Contemporary Black Artists in 2021, and another, Day Jobs, featuring work by Emma Amos, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Tishan Hsu, Jim Campbell, Genesis Belanger, and many others, will open at the Blanton in early 2023.

In addition to curating exhibitions and producing scholarly publications at the Blanton, Roberts oversaw the reinstallation of the museums’s modern and contemporary collection, focusing on bolstering works by women and artists of color and helping to create dedicated spaces for video art and new works by contemporary artists. She also worked closely with Ellsworth Kelly to help realize the artist’s only building, Austin, the chapel-like space filled with monumental colored glass windows that opened in early 2018. She conceived the first-ever outdoor sound art gallery, which opened in 2023 on the Blanton grounds, and during the pandemic, co-created Texas Talks Art, a weekly 30-minute virtual conversation between a curator and artist to provide visibility to Texas artists and collaboration among museums across the state. In 2021-22, Roberts was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She opened the exhibition Assembly: New Acquisitions by Contemporary Black Artists in 2021, and another, Day Jobs, featuring work by Emma Amos, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Tishan Hsu, Margaret Kilgallen, Genesis Belanger, and many others, opened at the Blanton in early 2023 and will open at the Cantor in Spring of 2024.

Prior to her role at the Blanton, Roberts held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also served as director of research for the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Catalogue Raisonné. She earned her MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her BA in art history from Williams College in Massachusetts.

Marion Gill is the Deputy Director of the Cantor Arts Center where she is responsible for the museum’s day-to-day operations and administrative management. She works closely with the teams leading Finance, Human Resources, Facilities, Security, Collections, and Exhibitions Management.

Before coming to Stanford, she was the Associate Director of Special Projects at Princeton University and served as the Provost’s delegate on major projects. In this capacity, Marion provided planning and project management support to multi-year initiatives including the Art Museum’s expansion and rebuilding.

Prior to joining Princeton, Marion was the Director of Museum Planning and Operations at the International African American Museum (IAAM), in Charleston, South Carolina. In that position, she led the planning efforts for construction and up-fit coordination, facilities management, security and emergency operations, IT coordination, exhibition and media management, and retail operations (store and café).

Marion also spent more than 25 years at the Smithsonian Institution and played key roles in the planning and opening of two museums: the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004 and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016.

Gill is an alumna of the Northfield Mount Hermon School and holds a BA in Political Science from Fisk University.

Photo: Megan Roberts Pitts | Megapixels Media

Christina Linden has a professional practice that spans the fields of museum work, public engagement, and higher education. Throughout, she strives to support social relevancy and create platforms and access for underrepresented voices and audiences. She has most recently held joint positions as Head of Academic Engagement at the California College of the Arts Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Chair of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at CCA. Prior to holding her current faculty position at CCA, she also worked with graduate and undergraduate students as Visiting Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, and as a classroom instructor at San Francisco Art Institute, California State University East Bay, and Bard College. She served as Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the visitor-centered Oakland Museum of California from 2013–2017, where she curated projects with artists and community organizations including Math Bass, the Imperial Court of San Francisco, Roy De Forest, Jedediah Caesar, the San Francisco Suiseki Kai, Michelle Dizon, Judy Chicago, and Marion Gray. Linden continued working with OMCA through 2019 to curate Queer California: Untold Stories, a large-scale exhibition project focusing on LGBTQ+ history and art in California. In 2012 and 2013, she worked with the Education + Public Practice Department at SFMOMA on projects with artists Desirée Holman and Ben Kinmont. Her writing has been published in Art in America, Art Practical, Fillip, Modern Painters, SFAQ, Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, and numerous artists' books and exhibition catalogs. She is currently working on the book Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects in collaboration with artist Chris E. Vargas and curator David Evans Frantz. Linden holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College and a BA in Art History from New York University.

Magdelana (Maggie) Reyes was named Director of Development in 2023. At the Cantor, she is responsible for advancing the organization's mission by implementing a strategic fundraising strategy, including the membership and special events programs.

She most recently worked at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she successfully designed and executed communications strategies, as well as oversaw several major digital transformation projects. Prior to Stanford, Magdelana held roles at the Jersey City Museum, Lucas Schoormans Gallery, and Stay Gold Gallery.

Magdelana holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, an MA in Art Business from Sotheby's Institute of Art, and a BA in Art History and Urban Studies from Stanford University.