Associate Curator for the Arts of the Islamic World
Simon Rettig is the Associate Curator for the Arts of the Islamic World at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. He previously worked at the French Research Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul and the Freie Üniversität in Berlin. Rettig received a BA from the École du Louvre in Paris and his MA and Doctorate from the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I, France.
Between 2012 and 2016, he was the curatorial fellow for the arts of the Islamic World at the Freer and Sackler. Rettig curated the exhibition Nasta‘liq: The Genius of Persian Calligraphy (2014), The Prince and the Shah: Royal Portraits from Qajar Iran (2018), and was the co-curator with Massumeh Farhad of The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (2016). In 2020, he served as the in-house curator in charge of the exhibition Age Old Cities: A Virtual Journey from Palmyra to Mosul. His current projects include the preparation of an exhibition on the Great Mongol Shahnama (scheduled for 2024) and a monograph on the Freer’s celebrated Khusraw u Shirin manuscript.