Ann Dumas is a curator at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and consultant curator of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is a specialist in 19th-century and early 20th-century French art. After graduating from the Courtauld Institute of Art, she was awarded a Hilla Rebay International Fellowship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1982–1984). From 1984 to 1989, she was an assistant and then associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In 1989, she was a Mellon Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked on a catalog of their early 20th-century French paintings, and in 2006, she was a recipient of a research fellowship at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

A leading scholar on the work of Edgar Degas, Ann Dumas has published extensively on the artist and has conceived and curated several exhibitions including The Private Collection of Edgar Degas (The National Gallery, London, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1997). Among other major international exhibitions for which she has been responsible are Matisse, His Art and His Textiles (Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005); Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; and Musée d’Orsay, Paris; 2006–2007). Her exhibitions for the Royal Academy of Arts include From Russia (2008); Sargent and the Sea (2010); The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters (2010); Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement (2011); George Bellows: Modern American Life and Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse (2016); Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 and Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet (2019); and Picasso and Paper (2020). Future projects include Whistler, Courbet and The Woman in White (2021).