Ann Thomas

Ann Thomas (born August 4, 1943) was the curator of photography and was twice made the interim chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2010 and 2018). She retired from the gallery after working there more than 40 years in 2021. She now works as an independent curator. At the National Gallery, she curated or co-curated numerous major exhibitions and authored or co-authored their accompanying catalogues, and books, essays and articles on photography as well as lecturing and giving talks on the subject. In 2018, Thomas said:

My great passion has been for the collecting, for exhibitions and for educating people about photography and its role in the arts from the 19th century on,

Career Thomas was born in Durban, South Africa.

She got her B.A. at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal (1972-1973), then her Masters degree in Fine Art at Concordia (1974-1976). Don McCullin: A Retrospective (2013), the first solo show of a photojournalist at the gallery; Made in America 1900-1950: Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada (2011); The Great War: the persuasive power of photography (2014) about which the Ottawa Citizen wrote "'Faked' and real images still shock 100 years later" and which had some of its photos discussed on radio; Luminous and True: The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans (2015); The intimate world of Josef Sudek (2016), the first exhibition of its scale with a 300 page catalogue; and The extended moment: fifty years of collecting photographs at the National Gallery of Canada (2018) which had 175 outstanding photographs in different media by 100 photographers from the collection of 200,000 photographs, organized in seven themes, and travelled to New York's Morgan Library and Museum.

Thomas was also a pioneer in collection building in photographs and broadened the guidelines of what was collected. Among the treasures she brought into the collection was one of Alvin Langdon Coburn's Vortographs which she was able to acquire in 2007. and "A Tale of Two Schools: "The New School for Social Research and the Photo League 1934-1955" published in "Frame and Focus: Photography as a Schooling Issue". She retired from the National Gallery in 2021.

In 2024, for the Portrait Gallery of Canada, she curated the online exhibition Max Dean: Portrait of the Artist as Artist.

Awards Thomas' Lisette Model catalogue/book was one of the five recipients of 12th annual George Wittenborn Memorial Book Awards in 1990. Her show No Man's Land: The Photography of Lynne Cohen; Beauty of Another Order won the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award in 1998. She was nominated for a Scotiabank Photography Award in 2011 and was a recipient of a three-month Getty Research Fellowship the same year.

Professional activities Thomas was an adjunct professor at Carleton University, Ottawa (2011-2014).