Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University and the former Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art (2007–2014).

He studies questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological content of nineteenth-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in nineteenth-century European society. 

He has written extensively on the history and problematics of exhibiting architecture, and the history of museological practices in relationship to architecture. 

A specialist in the history of modern architecture, he has curated exhibitions at MoMA, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Musée d’Orsay, and Mies in Berlin (2001), Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955- 1980 and Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive (2017). A former President of the Society of Architectural Historians, Bergdoll is the President of the Board of the Center for Architecture, New York.