Anna Vestergaard Jørgensen is an art historian, working on the entanglements of art museums and colonial history with a particular focus on the role of national galleries past and present. 

Her current project, “Rethinking (Trans)National Galleries in the North” (2022-24), attends to the questions of what a national gallery is, if transnational connections rooted in Scandinavian colonialism are taken into consideration. The project thus includes both the question of how shared pasts are sedimented in the national galleries around the Nordic and Arctic region, and how a concept like ‘the national’ is rethought in former colonial areas such as Greenland and Sápmi where the building of new national galleries is under debate. The project is based at Aarhus University and the SMK - National Gallery of Denmark.  

She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Copenhagen with the dissertation The Museum of Discomfort - Exhibiting Colonial Histories at the Statens Museum for Kunst. Through studies of historical and contemporary exhibitions, the thesis considers how colonial history appears as something uncomfortable within the art museum space: both in terms of “affective work” done by external collaborators and in terms of the practical work and decision-making in curatorial processes.

Curatorial practice is a central part of Anna’s work. Most recently, she was part of the curatorial team for the exhibition “Kirchner and Nolde - Up for discussion” (SMK, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Brücke-Museum 2021-22) that focused on the intersections of German Expressionism and colonialism. Previously, she has worked as a curator at the kunsthalle Rønnebæksholm (2016-17).

She is a member of the international research project The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories and editor of the journal Periskop.