The executive director of the American Folk Art Museum, which is in default on interest payments due for $31.9 million of bonds, is leaving the museum in July.

Maria Ann Conelli said today on the museum’s website that after six years at the museum, she’s returning to academia. She didn’t return a call or e-mail for comment. Susan Flamm, a spokeswoman, declined to comment.

The museum, a few feet west of the Museum of Modern Art on Manhattan’s W. 53rd Street, missed $3.7 million in payments to a debt service fund connected to bonds issued to construct a new building, it said in a January filing. It didn’t expect to make payments into the fund “for the foreseeable future,” the museum said.

Exhibitions of paintings, drawings and quilts -- many of them acclaimed -- failed to attract attendance and revenue projected a decade ago when the bonds were issued. The museum has been searching for a patron to rescue it, possibly in exchange for prominently displaying his or her name.