Dennis Barrie

Dennis Barrie is an internationally recognized museum director, cultural historian and expert in popular culture who has built museums on, perhaps, unexpected subjects: rock and roll, spying and the Mob.

He began his career in the art world as Midwest Director of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, then directed Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center from 1983 to 1992. In 1990 he and the center were indicted on obscenity charges over Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition The Perfect Moment. A Cincinnati jury acquitted both, in what is considered the first criminal trial of an art museum over the contents of an exhibition.

He went on to become co-creator and founding executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. With Kathy Barrie and their firm, Barrie Projects, he led the development of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, and The Mob Museum: National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement in Las Vegas, along with numerous exhibits and museums around the country, and took on the first comprehensive Olympic and Paralympic museum in the US, in Colorado Springs.