The Minneapolis Institute of Art has chosen curator Yasufumi Nakamori to head its Photography and New Media department starting May 31, 2016.

Nakamori has been associate curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX, since 2008. While there he purchased more than 700 images for the museum's collection and organized forward-looking exhibitions of mostly modern and contemporary images. His 2015 show "For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography,1968-1978" traveled to the Grey Art Gallery and the Japan Society in New York City, and he broke ground in 2008 by organizing the Texas institution's first show of video art, "I Still Believe in Tomorrow: Contemporary Video from Asia."

An international lecturer on post-1945 art, Nakamori earned his doctorate in art history from Cornell University in 2011. He was a curator for the Singapore International Photography Festival in 2010, and at the Singapore Biennale in 2006. His previous curatorial posts were at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He has also taught in Houston at Rice University and in New York City at Hunter College and The Museum of Modern Art.

Among the photos he purchased for Houston were pieces by Matthew Buckingham, Thomas Demand, Naoya Hatakeyama, Miyako Ishiuchi, Danny Lyon,Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, and Martha Rosler.

His award-winning 2010 catalogue "Katsura- Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture" documents a collaboration between architect Kenzo Tange and photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto. In Houston he also secured a gift of roughly 300 Ishimoto photos that made the museum's collection of the artist's work the second largest outside Japan.

Nakamori follows David Little who chaired the Minneapolis museum's photography department from 2008 through June 2015 when he departed to become Director and Chief Curator of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Amherst, MA.