Recent career highlights include the show Mythmaking and Truth-telling: American and Regional Art, which earned her the 2018 Award for Excellence from the international Association of Art Museum Curators, and Power Couples: The Pendant Format in Art, selected by The Utah Review as one of the state’s top ten cultural moments of 2019 and winner of the Utah Museums Association Award for Excellence. Her museum career began fifteen years ago at University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art and continued at the Frist Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Denmark, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Concurrently, she taught art history courses at Brooklyn College, Parsons the New School for Design, and Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design. For six years, she was a reader for the College Board’s Advanced Placement Art History exam.
Leslie has published articles in the academic journals Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, Journal 18, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Norwegian-American Studies, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and Rutgers Art Review. A former Fulbright scholar at the University of Copenhagen, Leslie’s research has received additional support from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Previously, she was appointed by Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski to serve on the Art Design Board, which administers the City's public art program, and she is currently a member of the editorial board for the peer-reviewed journal Arts, as well as 4Culture’s Heritage Advisory Committee. Leslie graduated cum laude with a BA in History and MA in Art History from the University of Florida. She also holds a certificate in Scandinavian Languages from New York University and an MPhil in Art History from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she completed her doctoral coursework and oral examinations.
