Clifford Chanin

Executive Vice President and Museum Director

Clifford Chanin is Executive Vice President & Director of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, with responsibility for the growth of the museum’s exhibitions, collections, education, and public programs.

He joined the initial planning team for the Museum in 2005 and has since served as vice-president for education and deputy director for museum programs.

He has curated several Museum exhibitions, including Revealed: The Hunt for Bin Laden, serving also as executive producer of the History Channel documentary of the same name; Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17 by Francesc Torres; 9/11 and the American Landscape: The Photographs of Jonathan Hyman. He edited exhibition catalogs for the latter two exhibitions.

Chanin also coedited The Stories They Tell: Artifacts from the National September 11 Memorial Museum (Rizzoli, 2013).

For ten years, Chanin was associate director of arts and humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he developed programs on pluralism and development in the Muslim world.

Chanin is also founder of the Legacy Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting how societies reckon with histories of conflict and mass violence. Based on this work, he curated a permanent art collection for the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.

Previously, he worked as a journalist and as a spokesman for the mayor of New York. He received a BA from Wesleyan University and master’s degrees in journalism and international affairs from Columbia University.

He has been a fellow of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and the Japan Society, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.