PhD, University of Southern California
MA, University of Southern California
BA, University of California, Berkeley

Sandra Zalman is an Associate Professor of Art History and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty in the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art. In 2024, she received the University’s Teaching Excellence Award.

Her first book “Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism,” now available in paperback, argues that Surrealism worked as a powerful agitator to disrupt dominant ideas of modern art in the United States. It won the 2016 SECAC Award for Excellence in Research and Publication and was supported with fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Association of University Women. She has also received an arts writer grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which she used to research the Gallery of Modern Art, a museum that sought to challenge MoMA’s cultural capital in the 1960s.

Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a senior fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation, she is currently working on a book about how museums of modern art expanded their cultural footprint at mid-century, using innovative architecture to advance competing ideas of modern art. She is especially interested in how museums frame art for public consumption. To that end, she co-edited a volume on the Museum of Modern Art’s first twenty years “Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment 1929-1949.”

Zalman’s research has appeared as feature articles in Art Journal, Grey Room, Histoire de l’Art, Modernism/modernity, Woman’s Art Journal, Tate Research Publications, the Journal of Art Historiography, the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and the Journal of Surrealism in the Americas, where she is also an editor. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Southern California and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

At UH, she teaches courses on Museums and the Problem of Display, Surrealism and its Legacies, the Spectacle in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, The Curatorial Impulse in the Twentieth Century, and ARTS 1304: Art and Society from Renaissance to Modern.