Patricia Phagan is the former Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, where she served from 2000 to March 2021. Previously, she was the curator of prints and drawings at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens and research assistant at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. During her career she has curated over fifty exhibitions, authored and edited numerous catalogues and articles, and given tours, talks, and interviews. Her exhibitions have won awards from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Art Dealers Association of America Foundation, and Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, among others.
She has a Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she received the Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, an M.A. in art history from the University of Cincinnati, and a B.A. in painting and drawing from Mercer University. A specialist in twentieth-century art and in the history of prints and drawings, she also has interests in graphic satire, political cartoons, and art by women.
Undertakings include Women Picturing Women: From Personal Spaces to Public Ventures (2021), Thomas Rowlandson: Pleasures and Pursuits in Georgian England (2011), and REMBRANDT: Treasures from the Rembrandt House, Amsterdam (1998). Reviews of her exhibitions and catalogues have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Print Quarterly, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, The Art Newspaper, and Burlington Magazine.
