Terry previously worked as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum from 1985 to 2015, overseeing the American Art collections from 2005 to 2015 as Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art. She was principal author of American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum: Artists Born by 1876, winner of the College Art Association's Alfred H. Barr Prize, and project director for the innovative collection installation American Identities: A New Look (2001). Terry's curatorial projects included the exhibitions Eastman Johnson: Painting America; Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties; John Singer Sargent Watercolors; and Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties. She was the 2014 recipient of the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art, presented by the Smithsonian Institution's Archive of American Art. Terry completed her graduate work at the University of Delaware (M.A.) and the CUNY Graduate Center (Ph.D.).