Michael Conforti

Michael Conforti (born 1945) is an American art historian, curator, and museum director. He is Director Emeritus of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History at Williams College. Conforti served as director of the Clark Art Institute from 1994 to 2015, overseeing major institutional expansion and development initiatives. He is the recipient of Swedish Order of the Polar Star.

Biography Conforti was born on April 3, 1945, in Haverhill, Massachusetts,

After three years with Sotheby’s in London and New York, he pursued graduate study at Harvard University, receiving his M.A. in 1973 and Ph.D. in 1977 with a dissertation on late baroque sculpture in Rome. In 1980 he joined the Minneapolis Institute of Art as Chief Curator and Bell Memorial Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, and served as Interim Director for Art from 1987 to 1988.

In 1994, Conforti was appointed Director of the Clark Art Institute, a position he held until 2015. During his tenure, the Clark introduced a program of self-organized exhibitions from 1996 and established a Research and Academic Program with conferences and long-term fellowships from 1997. He also oversaw a campus expansion project valued at $145 million that added 98,000 square feet of new building space to the Clark’s 140-acre campus. He retired as director in 2015 and subsequently continued professional activities through teaching in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and through board and advisory service. His research interests include the history of museums and collecting, international cultural exchange, and decorative arts.

Conforti was president of the Association of Art Museum Directors from 2008 to 2010 He also served as a trustee of the Menil Collection in Houston (2015-18) the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the (Philip) Guston Foundation and the Worcester Art Museum. He served on the International Advisory Board for the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (2010-22) and the Forum Wissen at the University of Göttingen (2016-22). He continues as an advisor to the Aspen Institute’s Artist-Endowed Foundation Initiative, the Scuderie al Quirinale in Rome, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Friends of the National Gallery in London.

Personal life Conforti is married to Licia (Peterson) Conforti. They have two children, Peter, who resides outside of Boston with his wife, Abby, and Julia who lives in New York City. He also held fellowships and visiting appointments at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in 1993, the J. Paul Getty Museum from 1988 to 2016, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2017. "History, Value and the 1990s Art Museum" ,Papers of the XXCVIII Internationaler Kongress für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin, 15-20 July, 1992, Berlin, 1993. pp. 3-14.

Conforti, Michael. (1997). Les musées des arts appliqués et l’histoire de l’art. In E. Pommier (Ed.), Histoire de l’histoire de l’art (Vol. 2, 18th and 19th centuries, pp. 327–347). Musée du Louvre.

Conforti, Michael (2024-08-26). Meet Michael Conforti ’64: Art Historian, Museum Director, and Lifelong Creative New Hampton School. Retrieved 2026-02-15.