The Yale Center for British Art announced Wednesday that it had named Courtney J. Martin as its new director. Ms. Martin is currently deputy director and chief curator of the Dia Art Foundation in New York.

In an interview, Ms. Martin described the appointment as an “opportunity to expand what we think of as British art, not only for the 20th and 21st centuries, but for all periods.” One of her priorities as director will be to reposition British art within a global framework of migration and cultural exchange.

“The museum has amazing collections of art that might have once been described as coming from the Commonwealth, and I would really like to show more works that come from the South Pacific and South Asia,” she said. “There are notable links between British artists working outside of the country and artists born in those places.”

Ms. Martin has deep experience with British art, particularly of the postcolonial era. She has written extensively on the Pakistani-born artist and editor Rasheed Araeen, and in 2012 she organized an exhibition of the Guyanese-British painter Frank Bowling at Tate Britain in London.