STEPHANIE BELT

Stephanie Thomas Belt
Stephanie Thomas Belt passed away at age 77, on May 21, 2021, at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. For thirty years, until her retirement in 2012, she served as Head of the Department of Loans and the National Lending Service at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In that capacity, Stephanie laid the foundations for administering loans of paintings from the National Gallery's collection to exhibitions around the world. She also worked to establish a new national program in 1988, the National Lending Service (NLS), which lent works of art from the National Gallery to temporarily supplement the collections of smaller institutions and underserved communities. The NLS program circulated as many as twelve exhibitions at a time, including, for example, George Catlin's paintings of Native Americans, and American Naïve Paintings. Under Stephanie's leadership, thousands of works circulated through out the U.S., bringing the nation's collectio
to the nation. As head of the Department of Loans, she was responsible for the safety and disposition of works of art in a major museum. She safeguarded and accompanied valuable paintings to exhibitions in sites around the world, including Australia and China.
Stephanie Belt was born on January 7, 1944, in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, the daughter of Shirley Mae Greif Belt and Kenneth Belt. She completed her B.A. and M.A. in art history at American University in Washington, DC, in 1970. Stephanie entered the Ph.D. program in art history at Johns Hopkins University, and spent a year in Venice, Italy, doing dissertation research on the Italian Renaissance artist Paris Bordone. Before completing the doctorate, she decided on a career in the museum field and joined the National Gallery in 1982.
A lifelong travel enthusiast, Steffi (as she was known to her friends) loved good restaurants and cuisine, art, books, and family history, and she enjoyed collecting antique furniture. For many years, she lived in the Ponce de Leon, a historic apartment building on Connecticut Avenue that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. She will be remembered as a kind and generous colleague, whose dedication and contributions to the National Gallery were immense, and as a warmhearted, life-embracing, intellectually stimulating friend, with an irresistible sense of humor and an abiding interest in politics, border collies, and the English royal family.
Stephanie Belt is survived by her cousins Ann Ransdell and Mary Boris of Louisville, Kentucky, and Donna Wallace of Douglasville, Georgia. She will be buried at a later time, next to her mother at the Elizabethtown (KY) City Cemetery.