Lynda Roscoe Hartigan is Chief Curator of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Previously, she was Chief Curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), where she was also the founding curator and Director of SAAM's Joseph Cornell Study Center.

An internationally recognized authority on Cornell with exhibitions devoted to the artist since 1980, Hartigan is organizing a nationally touring Cornell retrospective for the SAAM in 2006. Her specialties also include modern and contemporary art, America folk art, and African American art.