DIANA DU PONT
Diana du Pont has thirty years combined experience as an art curator and independent writer. She has written dozens of museum catalogues and many published books, including IPPY, College Art Association, and Art Directors Club Award winners. She has also been a J. Paul Getty Museum Fellow.
A specialist in modern and contemporary art, Diana began her career as a photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. During fifteen years at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, she brought international recognition to the institution for its Latin American art collections and exhibitions. Her related books include Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted; Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerszo; and Florence Henri: Artist-Photographer of the Avant-Garde.
Diana is also a biographer and ghostwriter. Her most recent book, You Can’t Eat Dirt chronicles the remarkable life story of Vyola J. Ortner, the first Native American woman to lead an all-women’s Tribal Council. She is now at work on the life stories of successful entrepreneurs in the Upper Midwest, not high-flying, celebrity CEOs but quiet, under-the-radar business leaders who have, through their ingenuity and hard work, built successful companies that transform their industries and communities.
Diana is also known as the “Fur Momma,” having adopted an off-track Thoroughbred and rescued a Black Lab and then nurturing and loving them as her own. Dedicated to the ethical and humane treatment of all animals, she is a fervent believer in animal adoption and rescue.
Diana’s newest manuscript Another Kind of Motherhood is a memoir that traces her trajectory from being a hopeless careerist—shaped early on by a family in disarray and later by feminist dictates—to bringing needy animals into her world and finding, through their charms and challenges, a wholly satisfying way to live, work, and, in essence, be.
Home for Diana is the Double 8 Farm on the plains of the Upper Midwest, where she lives and works alongside her husband and animals.