Director of the Des Moines Art Center, Jeff Fleming also has served as its acting director, deputy director, senior curator, and curator. He was chief curator of exhibitions at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Fleming studied at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina and holds a master of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
His exhibition projects have focused on presenting the first one-person museum shows for younger, international artists. These artists include the American artists Tom Sachs, John Currin, Ellen Gallagher, Maya Lin, and Tom Friedman, as well as the British artist Cecily Brown, the German artists Christian Jankowski and Anselm Reyle, and the Chinese artist Yan Pei Ming. Group exhibition projects have included Magic Markers: Objects of Transformation; Aisle 5; and My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation. In 2011, Art and Living magazine named him one of eleven innovative directors of American museums.