Ann Y. Smith is a museum consultant who lectures and writes about the cultural history of western New England.  A long-time director and curator at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, she led the museum’s move to its expanded facility on the city Green in 1986 and created its acclaimed exhibit Coming Home: Finding Community in a Changing World in 2008.  She was the guest curator for the ASLH national award-winning exhibit, publication and CD on furniture making in northwestern Connecticut at the Litchfield Historical Society in 2008.

Her essays on 18^th century furniture, architecture and social history and her articles on 19^th century painting and the culture of Connecticut have appeared in publications including The Magazine Antiques, American Art Review, Fine Arts Connoisseur, ECHO (the Encyclopedia of Connecticut History Online) and the journal Connecticut History.  Her recently published books include Hidden in Plain Sight: The Whitemore Collection and the French Impressionists (2009) and To Please Any Taste: Litchfield County Furniture & Furniture Makers, 1780-1830 (2008).





She has served as adjunct faculty of art history and architectural history at the University of Connecticut, Waterbury; chairman of the Connecticut Humanities Council, a board member of the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts; and a grants reviewer at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A graduate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she earned her M. A. at the Cooperstown Graduate Program SUNY, and her J.D at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

She and her husband, the racing historian and author Joel Finn, live in northwest Connecticut.