Ryan N. Dennis is Co-Director and Chief Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Dennis joined CAMH in 2023 as Senior Curator and Director of Public Initiatives. In this role, she stewarded Rebirth in Action, the Museum’s collaboration with Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy (HFTC), working closely alongside CAMH’s Partnerships team, and co-curated Theaster Gates’s blockbuster solo exhibition The Gift and The Renege (2024). She joined CAMH from the Mississippi Museum of Art where she curated Leonardo Drew’s City in the Garden (2020), Betye Saar: Call & Response (2021), and Dusti Bonge: Piercing the Inner Wall (2021), and organized CAPE Artist-in-Resident Shani Peter’s Collective Care for Black Mothers and Caretakers with the local Jackson community. She is the co-curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration and also the co-curator of the 2021 Texas Biennial A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon (2021).

Previously she served as the Cura­tor and Programs Director at Project Row Houses (PRH) in Houston, where she worked with over 100 BIPOC artists to exhibit their work, led the creation of the 2:2:2 Exchange Residency Program with the Hyde Park Art Center in Chi­cago, and established Project/Site, a temporary, site-specific, commission-based public art program. In 2017, she launched the PRH Fellowship with the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the University of Houston’s Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts.

Dennis earned her master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute with a focus in Curatorial Practice. Her writings have appeared in online and print catalogs, journals, and publications nationally and internationally and she has served as the guest art editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She has been a visiting lecturer and critic at a number of art schools and institutions and has taught courses on community-based practices and contemporary art at the University of Houston.

Melissa McDonnell Luján is Co-Director and Chief Operating Officer at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Luján is a museum professional with over 15 years of experience planning and managing capital and site-specific artist projects and leading operations activities for cultural organizations and private developers.

Luján was most recently the Director of Project Development at the Menil Collection, where she led capital projects and real estate development for the 30-acre urban museum campus since 2014. In addition to her work at the Menil, Luján has served as the treasurer on the board of Gulf Coast: Journal of Literature and Fine Arts at the University of Houston since 2016. From 2011 to 2014, Luján was Deputy Director and a project manager for Ballroom Marfa, a multi-disciplinary contemporary arts organization in Marfa, Texas. While living in Marfa, Luján was an instructor at the Texas Tech University College of Architecture El Paso and served on the boards of El Paso Opera, Amor Por Juárez, Marfa Montessori, and Marfa Public Library. Before working in museums, Luján spent ten years in private design practice, including residential and small multi-family architecture, landscape, and retail design in Texas, California, Japan, and New York.

Luján has a Master of Architecture from Rice University School of Architecture in Houston, an Honors Bachelor of Arts in Spatial Arts and Design from Central Saint Martins in London, and an Associate of Applied Science in Retail and Exhibition Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.