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“Art Museum Educators: Who Are They?” is one of the earliest published studies about individuals in the profession of art museum education. Zeller’s questions elicited responses about their demographics, education, experience, professional involvement, and level of status in art museum professional hierarchies. The results showed that most respondents were upper‐middle class, married women with degrees in art history; had professional involvements with art historical associations and scholars; and existed on a relatively low rung of the professional ladder. The quest to understand more about these individuals is just as relevant 35 years later, as the field navigates a profound paradigmatic shift intent on investing in diverse communities and individual visitors over strictly art‐historical interpretations of objects . This study asks who art museum educators are now and shares the result of a nationwide questionnaire on the personal and professional entanglements of AMEs; critically examines the collected data on those individuals who envision and enact a public curriculum on behalf of their institutions; and suggests broader implications for the field and for art museums that are vastly different than ones Zeller knew.

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Art museum educators have long occupied a lower rank than their curatorial counterparts in the institutional hierarchies of their organizations. This manuscript provides an overview of research that attempted to make sense of art museum educator/curator positionalities by suggesting a sexed and gendered binary of museum work. I turn to queer theory to trouble and expand that analysis by situating education/curation as one of many contradictory discourses within a larger Western epistemological tradition that fueled myriad binaries and cast specific bodies in sexed and gendered ways. I utilize the physical structure of basementthe location of many art museum education departments and officesas a corollary to the queer closet, a space to interrogate the charged education/curation pairing, explore the habitus of contemporary art museum educators, and evoke queer orientations that consider the basement a point of departure rather than a final point of physical and institutional situatedness.