Roald Nasgaard (Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, NYU) was Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art Department at Florida State University from 1995 to 2006. His teaching career began at the University of Guelph in 1971. In the years between, before returning to academia, he had a long and distinguished museum career. From 1975 to 1978 he served as Curator of Contemporary Art and then, until 1993, as Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Among the many exhibition catalogues he authored are:

• Yves Gaucher: A Fifteen-Year Perspective (1979)
• Structures for Behaviour: New Sculptures by Robert Morris, David Rabinowich, Richard Serra and George Trakas (1978)
• The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940 (1984)
• Gerhard Richter: Paintings (1988)
• Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990 (2001)

Other major curatorial projects at the AGO include The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today (1985) and Free Worlds: Metaphors and Realities in Contemporary Hungarian Art. He has held several Canada Council fellowships and grants as well as a Research Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (2002) and a Cornerstone (AHPEG) Grant, FSU (2006-2007). He won an OAAG Curatorial Writing Award in 1991 for his essay in Individualités: 14 Contemporary Artists from France. His Abstract Painting in Canada: A History was published in August 2007. His exhibition, The Urge to Abstraction, opened on September 15, 2007 at the Varley Art Gallery, Unionville Ont. His exhibition project for the Varley Art Gallery, Bourduas and the Automatistes, showed at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo in summer 2009.

Roald and his wife, Lori Walters, FSU Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages, split their time between Tallahassee and Toronto and travel often to Europe. The College of Fine Arts thanks them for their support, especially their gifts totaling more than 500 books and exhibition catalogues, which are available in our Art & Design Resource Room.