Susan Weber was born in 1954 in Brooklyn, New York City. She is an American historian, curator, and the founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center.
Weber built one of only a handful of American institutions offering advanced degrees in decorative arts.
Who is Susan Weber?
Susan Weber is an American historian and the founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture in New York City.
She holds the title of Iris Horowitz Professor in the History of Decorative Arts at the institution she built.
Weber established BGC in 1993, and it has since grown into an internationally respected research institute affiliated with Bard College.
She is also the author or editor of several award-winning books on decorative arts and design history.
Early Life of Susan Weber
Susan Weber was born in 1954 in Brooklyn, New York City. Her father, Murray Weber, manufactured shoe accessories, while her mother, Iris Weber, worked as a homemaker.
Weber’s paternal grandparents had emigrated to New York from Lithuania. Her mother passed on an early fondness for the decorative arts, an interest that would shape Weber’s entire career.
She grew up in a non-observant Jewish household in the New York City area. Describing her upbringing, Weber has said, “We were cultural Jews.”
Weber attended an Episcopalian high school in Brooklyn before going on to Barnard College at Columbia University. She graduated from Barnard with a degree in art history in 1977.
Susan Weber Age
Susan Weber was born in 1954. As of 2026, she is 72 years old, depending on her exact birth date, which has not been publicly confirmed beyond the birth year.
Her decades-long career now spans more than 30 years since she founded the Bard Graduate Center in 1993. She continues to serve as the institution’s director and lead faculty member.
Susan Weber Ethnicity and Nationality
Susan Weber is American, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She comes from a Jewish family, with her father’s parents having emigrated to the United States from Lithuania.
Weber has described her upbringing as culturally rather than religiously observant, a background she has spoken about in interviews discussing her early life.
Susan Weber Education
Weber earned her A.B. from Barnard College at Columbia University in 1977, majoring in art history. She went on to earn a master’s degree in 1990 from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s graduate program in decorative arts, offered jointly with Parsons School of Design.
Weber later pursued doctoral study at the Royal College of Art in London. She completed her Ph.D. there in 1998, with a thesis on the furniture of the English architect and designer E.W. Godwin.
Her academic training across three institutions, spanning art history, museum studies, and design history, laid the foundation for the graduate program she would go on to found. That combination of curatorial and scholarly training remains central to how BGC structures its own degree programs today.
Susan Weber Career
Susan Weber’s career moved from arts administration into academic leadership, culminating in the founding of her own graduate institution.
Early Career
Before founding BGC, Weber served as executive director of the Open Society Fund, a private foundation supporting freedom of expression and cultural exchange through grants to individuals and organizations.
She also worked as associate producer on two documentary films, “In Search of Rothko,” about painter Mark Rothko, and “The Big Picture,” about the New York School of Art.
In the early 1990s, Weber was turned down for a position as director of graduate education at Parsons School of Design, her own alma mater. That setback became the catalyst for her next move.
Founding the Bard Graduate Center
In 1993, Weber founded the Bard Graduate Center using $20 million in funding connected to her then-husband, George Soros. She established BGC as a graduate research institute offering degrees in the history of decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
BGC introduced a doctoral program in 1998, becoming the first institution of its kind in the United States to do so. The center remains one of only a few American institutions, alongside programs at the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Museum and Parsons, where students can earn an advanced degree in decorative arts.
Recent Work
Weber has curated exhibitions at BGC in partnership with major institutions, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the Villa Giulia in Rome. She also serves as publisher of West 86th, an academic journal covering decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
As of the 2023-24 academic year, BGC reported that more than 400 alumni had gone on to careers in academia, museums, and the private sector since the program’s founding. Weber continues to lead the institution as director while remaining active as a curator and author.
Susan Weber Business Achievements
Weber’s central achievement remains building BGC into a functioning graduate institution from the ground up, rather than joining an existing program. Under her direction, the center has developed a campus spanning an academic building, library, gallery space, and residence hall on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
She has also built partnerships with major museums worldwide for co-curated exhibitions. These collaborations have extended BGC’s reach well beyond its New York campus into the broader museum and academic communities in Europe.
Susan Weber Awards and Recognition
Weber received the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award in 2015 for the exhibition catalogue “William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain,” published by BGC and Yale University Press in 2013. She has also received the Philip Johnson Award from the Society of Architectural Historians and honors from the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation.
Her earlier book, “Thomas Jeckyll: Architect and Designer, 1827-1881,” won the 2004 Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society in America. That same book earned the 2005 Philip Johnson Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.
Susan Weber Husband
Susan Weber married George Soros, the American investor and philanthropist, in 1983. The couple divorced in 2005 after 22 years of marriage.
Weber has kept her personal life largely private since the divorce. There are no publicly known reports of her remarrying or entering a new public relationship.
Susan Weber Children
Susan Weber and George Soros had two sons together. Their older son, Alexander Soros, was born in 1985 and now chairs the Open Society Foundations. Their younger son, Gregory Soros, was born in 1988 and currently sits on BGC’s board of trustees.
Susan Weber Net Worth
Estimates place Susan Weber’s net worth at around $5 million as of 2026, based on her academic career, leadership role at BGC, and income from her published books.
Her financial history includes the $20 million she used to establish BGC in 1993, funding tied to her marriage to George Soros at the time.
The Bottom Line
Susan Weber founded the Bard Graduate Center in 1993 after being turned down for a leadership role at Parsons, building it into one of the only American institutions offering advanced degrees in decorative arts.
She trained across three institutions, Barnard College, the Cooper-Hewitt and Parsons joint program, and London’s Royal College of Art, before turning that scholarship into an institution of her own. Weber grew up in a culturally Jewish Brooklyn household and has described that background as central to her identity.
She continues to direct BGC today, curating exhibitions with institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum while publishing the academic journal West 86th. We hope you enjoyed reading about Susan Weber. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!