George Shackelford is deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Prior to his 2012 appointment at the Kimbell, Shackelford was chair of the department of the Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. After graduation from Dartmouth College in 1977, he received the Ph.D. from Yale University.

Shackelford has organized many exhibitions, with a concentration on the late nineteenth century in France. Among his projects are Degas: The Dancers, for the National Gallery of Art and Degas Landscapes for the MFA, Houston.  In Boston, his projects included Monet in the 20th Century, Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, Van Gogh: Face to Face, Impressionist Still Life, Gauguin Tahiti, and Degas and the Nude.

Shackelford was the David E. Finley Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and has lectured in museums and at universities worldwide. A founding trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators, he served as its president 2006-10. In 2005, he was elected a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France, and was named Officier in 2012.

His first exhibition at the Kimbell was Faces of Impressionism: Portraits from the Musée d’Orsay.  Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, shown in 2015, was followed the next year by Monet: The Early Years.  The sequel—Monet: The Late Years, and Renoir: The Body, The Senses, were shown in 2019.

Shackelford was the presenting curator for the 2021-22 U.S. premiere of Turner’s Modern World, organized in cooperation with Tate Britain and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is at work on an exhibition of the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, to be shown in 2023-24.