The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford has announced the recent appointment of Norfolk resident Robert Dance to the museum’s board of trustees. 

Since joining the board late last year, he has been serving on the Curatorial Committee. 

Dance has a long history of experience in art museum governance. He was chair of the board of overseers of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, on the board of the Bellarmine Museum at Fairfield University, and on the Director’s Council of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. He is a council member of the John Kobal Foundation in London, a member of the Visiting Committee of the Department of Drawings at the Morgan Library in New York, and a member of the Drawings Council at the Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif.

He also currently serves on the council of the Grolier Club in New York, the oldest bibliophilic club in North America.

In Norfolk, he is president of of the board of directors of the Norfolk Historical Society, president of the Doolittle Lake Company and past president of the board of trustees of the Norfolk Library.

Dance is also a well-known collector of classic Hollywood photographs and has written several books on Hollywood. His most recent work, published last year, is “The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo Captured Hollywood.”

The Wadsworth Atheneum, founded in 1842, it is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States. Spread over five connected buildings on Main Street in Hartford, it houses almost 50,000 works, mostly European and American art, from antiquity to the present day. Dance says that “it is a honor to be associated with such a distinguished and rich art collection.”