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A graduate of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Scott began his career in 1990 at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. He joined the Speed Art Museum in 1999 as the museum’s first curator of decorative arts and design for a collection that ranges from late medieval to contemporary. Scott’s areas of interest include early nineteenth-century Kentucky decorative arts, the English and American Arts and Crafts movements, the intersection of art and industry in eighteenth-century England, and contemporary glass and ceramics.

Scott served as an interim director of the Speed from October 2012 through August 2013 before becoming chief curator in September 2013. In this capacity, he led the curatorial team during the museum’s $50 million expansion and renovation project (2012-2016). During the project, Scott created a satellite gallery, directed concept development and gallery design for reinstallation, and recruited multiple additions to the Speed’s curatorial team. In 2017, Scott stepped away from his role as chief curator to begin work on several research and exhibition projects.

Scott’s Kentucky-oriented work includes the creation and 2016 grand opening of a new, 5,600-square-foot Kentucky Gallery at the Speed. He also developed and launched the Kentucky Online Arts Resource (www.koar.org), an image database devoted to Kentucky’s artistic heritage. He has curated numerous Kentucky-focused exhibitions, including Making Time: The Art of the Kentucky Tall Case Clock, 1790-1850 (2019), Careful, Neat & Decent: Arts of the Kentucky Shakers (2020), Kentucky Women: Alma Wallace Lesch (2023), and Kentucky Artists – Kentucky Visions: Gifts from the Anna and Allan Weiss Collection (2024). Scott’s other recent exhibitions include Collecting – A Love Story: Glass from the Adele and Leonard Leight Collection (2021) and Pictures from Pieces: Quilts from the Eleanor Bingham Miller Collection (2022).