The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the adventurous cultural institution that’s seen a surge in attendance in recent years, named Nora Burnett Abrams as its new director on Tuesday. Dr. Abrams, who’s worked as a curator at the museum for the last 10 years, most recently as the Ellen Bruss curator and director of planning, has been responsible for organizing some of its most successful exhibitions.

Dr. Abrams, 41, will step in to replace Adam Lerner, the director and chief animator who stepped down this June after leading the museum since 2009. The Denver museum saw its attendance grow by 200 percent over the last five years , under his leadership, and has become a gathering place for the city’s teenagers.

The museum’s recent growth can also be attributed to Dr. Abrams’s distinct curatorial approach, which has focused on overlooked periods of artists’ lives and work. Among the more than 30 exhibitions she’s organized for the museum is “Basquiat Before Basquiat,” which focused on work the artist created in his East Village apartment before he became a prominent painter; the exhibition traveled to museums across the country and to the Netherlands. She was also behind an in-depth study of Ryan McGinley’s earliest photographs and a retrospective of the artist Tara Donovan’s work, which remains the museum’s most-attended exhibition.

A New York native, Dr. Abrams grew up visiting some of the world’s most esteemed cultural institutions, and said in a phone interview that she knew at age 18 she wanted to be a curator. She received her Ph.D in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and worked at MoMA and under the curator Nan Rosenthal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before moving to Denver in 2010.