About

Chelsea Garunay is the Exhibition Design Manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she has architectural creative oversight over all exhibitions and gallery installations.

Chelsea was previously the Senior Designer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where she designed over 60 exhibitions, galleries, and installations. Notable exhibitions at the MFA include Gender Bending Fashion (Grands Prix Gold Prize for Exhibition Design), #techstyle (International Design Communications Exhibition Design Bronze Award), Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, and Ancient Nubia Now. While at the MFA, she was also design lead on several of the permanent collection gallery renovations: Arts of Islamic Cultures, The Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting, and Masterpieces of the Pyramid Age.

Chelsea was awarded the 2021 Couch Family Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell to work on a series of conceptual collages and models for a new theatrical/narrative space. She has contributed exhibition design work to The Jewish Museum in NYC and design consultation services at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. She previously worked as a Junior Architect at Arquitectonica in NYC.

In addition to her own design work, Chelsea has served as a visiting lecturer or critic at Harvard, RISD, Cornell, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Wellesley College.

Chelsea received her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Yale University and her Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

IG: @chelsea_garunay