Elena Lioubimova is an independent art historian and museum professional with more than four decades of curatorial, research, and exhibition experience in Russia and the United States. She holds a Master of Arts from Lomonosov Moscow State University, where she specialized in sixteenth- through eighteenth-century European art, and a Master of Arts in Education from the College of William & Mary, with a focus on museum studies and American studies.
From 1981 to 1992, Ms. Lioubimova served as curator in the Department of Western European and American Art at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where she was actively involved in the development, attribution, and cataloguing of the decorative arts collection, as well as the planning of major international loan exhibitions.
After relocating to the United States, she pursued graduate studies and served as a teaching and research assistant at the College of William & Mary before joining the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation in 1999, where she advanced to the role of curator. During her tenure, she proposed, developed, and managed "The World of 1607," a landmark international exhibition and accompanying catalogue marking the Commonwealth of Virginia's 400th anniversary. The yearlong, four-cycle exhibition featured 378 artifacts from ten countries, was delivered on time and within a budget of approximately 4.5 million dollars, and drew more than 878,000 visitors.
Ms. Lioubimova has also served as an independent researcher for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, contributing to the exhibition and catalogue "Fabergé Revealed," and has worked as an expert for the Igor Carl Fabergé Foundation in Switzerland since 2011, participating in the preparation of a new catalogue raisonné. From 2014 to 2019, she held the position of chief curator and associate at the Research Center of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, where she oversaw collections management, database development, and curatorial projects including exhibitions on the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers in World War II, and major contemporary and avant-garde art shows.
Her research has been published in scholarly journals and conference proceedings in both Russia and the United States, and she has lectured widely on topics including Russian art, Fabergé, Shakespeare and material culture, and the history of private and public collections. She is a member of the International Council of Museums and the Association for Slavic and Eurasian Studies.