Anne W. Ackerson is a former history museum director, director of the Museum Association of New York, and executive director of the national Council of State Archivists (CoSA). She is currently an independent consultant to cultural and educational nonprofits, specializing in leadership and governance development, and management issues. Ackerson also facilitates the Leadership and Administration online course for the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), and co-teaches a course of leadership and museums at the Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies program. She is a member of The Museum Group, a national consortium of museum consultants working with museums to help them achieve their greatest potential in an ever-changing world. Her current work at CoSA includes a range of content development, communications, and fund development activities that span program development collaboration, drafting solicitation materials, and creating content for social media. Ackerson is a frequent keynoter, workshop presenter and author, focusing on issues of leadership, board and organizational development, governance issues, and planning. She is a regular webinar presenter on issues of museum leadership, succession planning, gender equity, and board roles and responsibilities. She developed curriculum materials and a webinar on strategic planning for AASLH’s StEPs program, a national standards program for history museums, and most recently assisted in the update of the program’s sections dealing with organizational transparency and accountability.

She is the co-author with Joan Baldwin of Leadership Matters, published in 2013 by AltaMira Press American Association for State and Local History series, and Women in the Museum: Lessons from the Workplace, published in 2017 by Routledge. A second edition of Leadership Matters: Leading Museums in an Age of Discord was published in 2019.

Her interest in leadership paved the way for her participation on a national team of 35 library, archives, and museum representatives, where she helped develop the Nexus LAB Layers of Leadership, an IMLS-funded project managed by Educopia Institute in collaboration with the Center for Creative Leadership. This project “…provides a common lens for understanding high-demand leadership training skills and competencies across libraries, archives, and museums. The ‘Layers of Leadership’ documents the key challenge, key leadership tasks, skills necessary to address those tasks, and outcomes sought within seven ‘layers’ of leadership, from ‘Leading Self’ to ‘Leading the Organization’ to ‘Leading the Profession.’"