Maryam Ekhtiar is curator in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She began working at the museum in 2003 as a specialist in the field of nineteenth-century Persian art and culture, calligraphy, and later Persian painting. She received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University in 1994 and has worked and taught at various museums and universities. She worked closely with Layla Diba at the Brooklyn Museum on the ground-breaking 1998 exhibition, Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785‒1925, and was coeditor of the accompanying catalogue.