Kurin is particularly responsible for all of the national museums, scholarly and scientific research centers, and programs spanning science, history, art and culture.

[3] He attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, and traveled to India in 1970, studying a Punjabi village and collecting artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History.

[6] In Pakistan he also conducted contract research on indigenous farming practices for Harza Engineering and the World Bank Indus Basin Master Planning Project and taught at the University of Karachi.

[2] He worked closely with Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley, Ralph Rinzler and Jeffrey Lariche and Indian designer Rajeev Sethi in organizing Aditi: A Celebration of Life, a major exhibition of the traditional Indian life cycle that included scores of musicians and artisans in the National Museum of Natural History, and curating Mela: An Indian Fair for the Festival of American Folklife outdoors on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.[8] He became deputy director of the Smithsonian's Office of Folklife Programs in 1985, then its acting director in 1988.

[12] Produced by Columbia Records with Don Devito and Harold Levanthal, it won a Grammy Award for best traditional folk album.

Kurin worked with fellow anthropologist Tony Seeger as the first director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and enlisted Grateful Dead drummer and musicologist Mickey Hart to re-engineer the collection.

[9] Smithsonian Folkways went on to produce more than a dozen Grammy winning and nominated albums, including the Anthology of American Folk Song in 1997.

[1] Kurin, with support from the U.S. Department of State, was appointed by the Director-General of UNESCO to a distinguished international jury for the Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage program in 1999.

[20][21] Kurin led Smithsonian efforts to make the institution a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship program site for three years for a project on theorizing cultural heritage.

[23] Kurin serves as the Smithsonian liaison to the White House Historical Association and the President's Committee for the Arts and the Humanities.

Funded by U.S.AID, The Broadway League, and other sponsors, the project sent more than 80 conservators to Haiti, trained more than 150 Haitians and saved some 35,000 artworks, artifacts, murals, sculptures, rare books and archives.

In 2015, David Skorton became Secretary of the Smithsonian and with the approval of the Board of Regents, the White House, and then Congress in 2016, reorganized its senior management, instituting the position of Provost.

Kurin served as a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington from 1985 to 1994.

His articles on ethnographic fieldwork, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief," museology and intangible cultural heritage have been often reproduced and widely cited.