Karol B. Wight is a museum administrator and is currently the president and executive director of
The Corning Museum of Glass. She specializes in the field of ancient glass.
Education
Wight received her PhD from the
University of California Los Angeles in art history.
Her doctoral thesis was on the topic of "Mythological beakers and
Roman glass production in the first century A.D."
Career
In 2011, Wight was appointed executive director of
The Corning Museum of Glass, a museum with a collection of 45,000 glass objects that represent the history, science and art of glass. In 2015 she was appointed president and executive director of the museum.
Prior to this appointment, she was senior curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.
She is also curator of ancient and
Islamic glass
The influence of the Islamic world to the history of glass is reflected by its distribution around the world, from Europe to China, and from Russia to East Africa. Islamic glass developed a unique expression that was characterized by the introdu ...
at the museum. Prior to that she held the position of senior curator of antiquities at the
J. Paul Getty Museum's
Getty Villa in Malibu, California. Over a period of 26 years she held various positions at the Getty.
In 2017, President
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...
appointed Wight to an advisory post on the Cultural Property Advisory Committee of the
U.S. Department of State
The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an United States federal executive departments, executive department of the Federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government responsible for the country's fore ...
.
Wight has published articles
and books on ancient glass objects and
glass making techniques.
Among them are the book, ''Molten color: glassmaking in antiquity''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wight, Karol
Living people
Directors of museums in the United States
Year of birth missing (living people)
University of California, Los Angeles alumni