Former Chief Operating Officer of Atlanta's High Museum Sentenced to a Year in Prison for Embezzlement

A former chief operating officer of Atlanta's High Museum of Art has been sentenced to 12 months in federal prison for stealing more than $600,000 from the museum, according to The Art Newspaper. The sentence was handed down on 2 November 2026 by US District Judge Michael L. Brown.

The man is Brady Lum, 60, of Atlanta, Georgia. He had worked at the High, one of the largest art museums in the American South, for almost seven years. He joined less than nine months before September 2019, when prosecutors say he began taking the money.

The scheme ran for more than six years. It was discovered in November 2025. According to the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia, Lum used museum funds to pay for personal purchases. Those included guitars, music lessons and woodworking equipment.

He hid the spending with falsified invoices, reimbursement requests and accounting adjustments, the court papers state. Those were the paper trails that made the payments look like legitimate museum business.

Lum has since repaid a large part of the money. He paid $607,688.18 in restitution, the court-ordered repayment to the victim, to the museum. He also voluntarily paid about $500,000 more to cover what the museum spent uncovering and investigating his conduct.

He was charged with theft in April 2026. In July he pleaded guilty before Judge Brown. Along with the 12 months in prison, he was sentenced to one year of supervised release, which means he must stay under court supervision for a year after leaving prison.

The High Museum's parent organisation is the Woodruff Arts Center, which runs several cultural institutions in Atlanta. Neither the museum nor the arts center was named as a party to the criminal case.

For a museum, every dollar taken by fraud is a dollar that cannot go to the galleries, staff or programmes it exists to fund. The case also shows how a senior finance role, which relies on trust, can be misused over many years when invoices and approvals are not checked closely enough.

The case began with a single person's spending and ended in a courtroom. What remains is a sentence of one year, a repayment figure and a museum that now has to rebuild the trust its budget depends on.