Eleanor Fink
Founder, American Art Collaborative
Eleanor E. Fink has held senior positions at the Smithsonian, J. Paul Getty Trust, and World Bank. She is one of the founding directors of the Getty Center in Los Angeles where she initially formed and headed the Getty Vocabulary Program and later became director of the Getty Information Institute (GII). As director, she oversaw the Getty’s flagship scholarly art history research databases including the Census of Antique Art and Architecture Known to the Renaissance; the Bibliography of the History of Art; and the Provenance Index. She positioned GII around the concept of universal access to art information and promoted national and international collaboration among institutions. The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), Getty Vocabularies, Categories for the Description of Works of Art, and Object ID are some of the products of her leadership.
At the World Bank she initially served as Senior Cultural Heritage Specialist to the President and then as point person for the Bank’s relationships with private foundations.
During her tenure at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, she was Chief of the Office of Research Support. She managed and in some cases initiated several national art research database projects that were created to help the scholarly and museum community better understand the history and significance of American art.
Most recently, she initiated and manages the American Art Collaborative, a Linked Open Data project that brings together 14 U.S. museums interested in erasing data silos to provide seamless access on the subject of American art across museum collections.
Eleanor serves on several advisory committees including the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and the EU funded Marie Curie Research Program on Digital Cultural Heritage (ITN-DCH). She is a former director of the Museum Computer Network and a former President of the Visual Resources Association.