Diva Zumaya, Ph.D., joined The Huntington as the associate curator of European art in June 2024. After receiving her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2018, she served as a postdoctoral fellow and assistant curator in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). As a graduate student, Zumaya taught classes in early modern European art history while also holding curatorial positions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum. At LACMA, she worked on the reinstallation of the permanent collection in the David Geffen Galleries and curated the 2023–24 exhibition “The World Made Wondrous: The Dutch Collector’s Cabinet and the Politics of Possession.”
In addition to writing a catalog to accompany “The World Made Wondrous,” Zumaya contributed to the volume Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures (Brill, 2025). In addition to being a specialist in 17th-century Dutch art, her research interests also lie in the art of Spain and the Iberian world, the global and colonial histories of materials, the cross-cultural exchange between Europe and Asia, and gender in early modern Europe. In her role as associate curator, Zumaya researches The Huntington’s collection of European art, finds new connections between objects, and collaborates with Library and Botanical colleagues.