Al Miner is an award-winning museum administrator, curator of contemporary art, artist and educator based in Washington, DC.

Miner is currently Deputy Director for Museum Experience and Digital Media at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He previously served as Founding Director & Chief Curator of Georgetown University’s art galleries where he was also Associate Professor of graduate museum studies. In the past Miner also served as a curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He has authored three books and organized dozens of exhibitions, which have been reviewed widely in publications including The New York Times. Miner has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The American Alliance of Museums and other organizations.

Miner’s own artwork reveals things usually hidden from public view. His self-portraits, intimate in scale and content, expose inner turmoil and bodily irregularities. Miner’s adept use of oil paint creates luscious surfaces, highlighting the alchemical nature of flesh. In some works he takes a macro view, in others, subjects are situated in a sea of white space evoking the feeling of being psychologically lost or separated from the subject by time, the haze of failing memory or secrecy. Miner’s frustration with gender concepts based on “average” bodies led him to research how maleness manifests in other species. Gaining special access to natural history museum collections (the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology), allowed him to study, dissect and photograph a variety of male animal genitals. This research resulted in two series of paintings, which document fantastical and diverse forms that exist even within singular groups such as butterflies collected by famed author, Vladimir Nabokov.