Provenance Research at The Met Team

Lucian is the head of provenance and leads the Museum’s cultural property initiatives and provenance research team. Lucian qualified as a lawyer in England in 1984 and was a partner London law firm specializing in legal malpractice defense work with a focus on white collar crime. Before joining the Met, Lucian was Vice Chairman of Sotheby’s North America and a Senior Specialist in Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department. Lucian founded Sotheby’s provenance research and restitution department in 1997 and was instrumental in resolving legal and ethical claims against artworks that subsequently sold for an aggregate exceeding $1.2 billion. Mr. Simmons has spoken widely on art market issues and on the displacement of art during WWII and has contributed to many books and periodicals.

Qamar Adamjee, an art historian of the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent (NYU IFA 2011) and a former research assistant in the Islamic department (2000–2008), returns to The Met in a new role. Qamar was a provenance researcher for the South Asian collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (2022–2024) and before that, associate curator of South Asian and Islamic art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (2009–2020). In her current position with the Asian department, Qamar looks forward to applying her academic, curatorial, institutional, and provenance research experiences to The Met collection.

Christine Brennan joined the Department in 1992. A specialist in the history of collecting, she oversees departmental collections management activities and provenance research. Brennan’s expertise focuses on the market for medieval art in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America. She has contributed to exhibitions at The Met and the Bard Graduate Center including (2020–2021) and Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013), respectively. She earned her PhD from the Bard Graduate Center with a dissertation titled, The Brummer Gallery and the Market for Medieval Art in Paris and New York, 1906-1949, and an MA in history and a certificate in Museum Studies from New York University.

Mary Chan joined The Met in 2005, originally in the Department of European Paintings, with the primary responsibility of cataloguing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings. She has worked in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art since 2012, overseeing the research and documentation of the permanent collection for The Met online collection. Prior to The Met, she worked in the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She holds a BA in art history from Vassar College and an MA from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

Jennifer Day joined the American Wing in 2024, serving as the inaugural NAGPRA Coordinator and Community Liaison at The Met. Working collaboratively, she helps to lead the Museum’s compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and engages in outreach to Native American and Indigenous communities regarding collections documentation, care, and repatriation. She also supports provenance research for The Met’s Native American collections. She brings to the institution a background in museum registration and community consultation. She received a BA in International Studies with minors in Art History and Spanish from the University of Oregon, and a MA in Museology from the University of Florida.

Anne Dunn-Vaturi conducts the provenance research and documentation for the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. Before joining The Met in 2009, she worked at the Louvre for an audit of long-term archaeological loans to other museums and for the task force researching looted art during the Nazi era. She is also a specialist in ancient board games (co-curator of the exhibition Art du Jeu, Jeu dans l'Art, Musée de Cluny, Paris, 2012–13; co-author of Ancient Egyptians at Play: Board Games Across Border, Bloomsbury Egyptology, 2016). Anne has an MA in art history, archaeology, and museum studies from the École du Louvre, and an MA in archaeology from the Sorbonne University, Paris.

Maxence Garde joined the department in March 2024 as a part-time Provenance Researcher to assist in researching complex object histories. His main interest is the study of Egyptian art and the crucial role provenance research plays in understanding antiquities collections. He is also the Curator in charge of the Antiquities Collection at the Museum Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, Portugal. There he oversees the conservation, research, and display of that collection, and will imagine and curate the future exhibitions. Maxence is not new to The Met as he held a fellowship in 2019 before joining the staff at the British Museum. He recently co-curated an exhibition at the Museo Egizio di Torino about the history of collecting antiquities during the twentieth century.

Maya Muratov is a practicing field archaeologist and cultural historian whose research interests include cultural and religious interactions between the Greeks, Romans, and the indigenous populations in the North Pontic region; terracotta figurines and puppet theater in the ancient Mediterranean; and history of collecting antiquities in Europe and the US in the 18th–early 20th centuries. She received her doctorate in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. From 2009 to 2024 she was a professor of Art History at Adelphi University. Having worked part-time on the department’s Provenance Project since 2009, Maya joined the department full-time in the summer of 2024.

George Sferra joined the Museum in 2011. George oversees data standards and project management for the department’s collections database and online collection; he also assists with collections care. Previously, he worked at the Association of Art Museum Curators and the Art Institute of Chicago. George earned his BA in classical civilization from Loyola University Chicago, and studied art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has curated exhibitions at the Gowanus Ballroom, and is a vocalist and keyboardist in the synth-pop band Banji.