Educated at Harvard, Phyllis Hattis studied at The Fogg Museum, writing her Ph.D. thesis on Ingres and the Development of Modernism. In 1970 she received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to join The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco as a Visiting Curator, publishing Four Centuries of French Drawings (1977). She moved to New York City in 1986, advising museums, corporations, and individual collectors and writing scholarly and critical essays for exhibition catalogues and journals. Phyllis oversaw A Curator’s Quest: Building the Collection of Painting and Sculpture of The Museum of Modern Art, 1967–1988 (2011), written by her late husband, William Rubin, and recently authored Masterpieces The William Rubin Collection: Dialogue of the Tribal and the Modern (2023).

Critic and art historian Phyllis Tuchman teaches and writes about art, particularly sculpture. She has taught at Williams College, Hunter College, and the School of Visual Arts. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.