Peggy Burchenal

Peggy Burchenal is a nationally recognized museum educator.  She was the Esther Stiles Eastman Curator of Education and Public Programs at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from 2000–2018 and has also held leadership positions at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She studied art history at Princeton and Harvard before moving to the world of museum education, where she has spent much of her career investigating best practices for helping visitors connect deeply and thoughtfully with art.

Peggy has served on the boards of both the Massachusetts Art Education Association and the National Art Education Association, and was named NAEA’s 2002 National Museum Educator. In 2001, as an invited guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute, she outlined a research project designed to explore how learning to look at art helps urban students develop their abilities to think critically and creatively. In 2003, the Gardner Museum won a major grant to implement this study from the U.S. Department of Education's Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination program; this three-year project, called “Thinking Through Art, ” won national and international recognition.