Michael Chagnon is a museum curator specializing in painting and the arts of the book from the early modern Persianate sphere. He was appointed Curator at the Aga Khan Museum in May 2019, where he has curated ten exhibitions, including Kour Pour: Cosmic Diagrams (2025-26), Rumi: A Visual Journey through the Life and Legacy of a Sufi Mystic (2023); Hakan Topal: The Golden Cage (2022), Remastered (2020-21), and Ekow Nimako / Building Black: Civilizations (2019-20). His forthcoming exhibition, opening in Spring 2027, focuses on the development and appreciation of gardens in Islamicate societies through an eco-critical lens.
Dr. Chagnon has previously held curatorial posts at the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, and Japan Society, and served in curatorial capacities for exhibitions at New-York Historical Society and Asia Society Museum.
Dr. Chagnon’s teaching experience includes Ph.D.-level directed reading courses on on Persianate painting (2024) and Arabic-alphabet calligraphy (2025) in the Department of Near and Middle East Studies, University of Toronto; the graduate seminar “Critical Approaches to Persianate Painting” at Columbia University (Spring 2019); a master-class series on Islamic manuscripts at the New York Public Library (2018); and surveys of Islamic art at City College of New York (2009-10), Montclair State University, New Jersey (2009), and the College of New Rochelle, New York (2008).
Recent essays include “Reza ‘Abbasi and the Embedded Image,” in the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts (2024); “Flirting with the Radical: Intertextuality, Intervisuality, and Gendered Subversions in Manuscripts of Sūz u Gudāz,” in the Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World (2021), “The Reception and Illustration of Hafiz in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Iran” in Studies on the Iranian World Vol. II: Medieval and Modern (2015), and “‘Cloath’d in Several Modes’: Oil on Canvas Painting and the Iconography of Human Variety in Early Modern Iran” in the Rietberg Museum exhibition catalogue The Fascination of Persia: The Persian-European Dialogue in Seventeenth-Century Art and Contemporary Art of Tehran (2013).