Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw

Faculty Director

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (she/her) is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on portraiture and issues of representation, with an emphasis on the construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the American context. She has previously served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In addition to her books, The Art of Remembering, Essays on African American Art and History, (Duke: 2024), Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke: 2004) and First Ladies of the United States (Smithsonian: 2020), she has also curated numerous exhibitions, including Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (2006), Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2015), and I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women, at the National Portrait Gallery.

Emily Zimmerman

Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs

zimmee3@upenn.edu

Emily Zimmerman (she/her) is the Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs at the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2022, she has advanced a program at the Arthur Ross Gallery that champions critical perspectives and community engagement — values encapsulated in the exhibitions she has curated, Songs of Ritual and Remembrance in 2023, and in Barbara Earl Thomas: The Illuminated Body in 2024.  She was previously the Director + Curator of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, where she advocated for artists using an expansive intersectional lens to advance racial and gender equity and worked with students to become active participants in their arts ecology.  Prior to joining the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Emily served as the Associate Curator of Programs at the Henry Art Gallery, where much of her work focused on building institutional partnerships and off-site programming. She began her curatorial career as the Associate Curator at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), producing commissions and residencies with Gordon Hall, Annie Dorsen, and Melvin Moti. She has curated over 50 commissions, solo, and group exhibitions with artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Clotilde Jiménez, Jesper Just, Marisa Williamson, Kerry Tribe, and others. She has taught graduate seminars on exhibition design and interdisciplinary practices, and has regularly taught an undergraduate seminar on “Curating Contemporary Art” for University of Washington, and the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Emily’s writing has appeared in BOMB and Contemporary Performance, and she has served on review panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, New York State Council on the Arts, Artist Trust, 4Culture, among others. Emily earned her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and her BA from New York University.

Miranda Powell

Gallery Coordinator

powellmj@upenn.edu

Miranda Powell (she/her) is the Coordinator for the Arthur Ross Gallery (ARG) at the University of Pennsylvania. She provides logistical and administrative support to the Director and Faculty Director for exhibitions and related events, coordinates the Engaging Minds Through Art educational outreach program, coordinates ARG student engagement initiatives, and manages facility rental requests. Before joining the ARG team, Miranda most recently served as Director for Special Events in the Office of Advancement at the University of the Arts where she managed the use of all specialized campus spaces and services by internal and external stakeholders, developed cultivation events, and led organizational efforts for the annual gala.

Prior to her time at UArts, Miranda spent over a decade developing arts education and community arts programs in higher education settings including Camden County College, where she served as Visual, Performing & Media Arts Coordinator and Administrator for the Camden County Cultural & Heritage Commission re-grantee programs, and Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts where she coordinated education and public programs on and offsite as Arts Education & Community Arts Program Coordinator.

Miranda earned her BA in Studio Art from Rutgers University-Camden. She lives happily in suburbia with her husband, son, and a trio of chihuahuas.