Press Releases
Arthur Ross Gallery at The University Of Pennsylvania Names Emily Zimmerman as Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs
July 10, 2024
The Arthur Ross Gallery is pleased to announce that Emily Zimmerman has been appointed to the role of Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs. In her new position Zimmerman will play a key role in strategic planning, educational initiatives, community partnerships, programming, fundraising, and audience engagement. She will work under the leadership of Dr. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, the Arthur Ross Gallery’s inaugural Faculty Director, whose appointment began on June 1.
An accomplished curator and lecturer, Zimmerman joined the Arthur Ross Gallery in 2022 as the Assistant Director. Since then, she has advanced a program 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, which saw the formation of the gallery’s first community advisory group. Zimmerman received the gallery’s first landmark grant of $240,000 from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for Barbara Earl Thomas: The Illuminated Body which enabled the Arthur Ross Gallery’s first high-level collaboration with Penn Live Arts in the presentation of Seth Parker Wood’s Difficult Grace. She has taught graduate seminars on exhibition design and interdisciplinary practices at the University of Washington, 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.
“I am thrilled to further the Arthur Ross Gallery’s expansive mission for artistic and scholarly inquiry,” Zimmerman says. “As a champion for multidisciplinary programming, community engagement, embodied learning, and institutional collaboration, I am excited to support the gallery’s exhibitions and programs in this new chapter.”
Zimmerman has curated and co-curated over 50 commissions, solo, and group exhibitions with artists such as Gordon Hall, Pierre Huyghe, Clotilde Jiménez, Guadalupe Maravilla, Kerry Tribe, and Marisa Williamson. She has produced more than 300 performances, festivals, film and lecture series, and symposia. In 2023, she was a co-curator for Out of Sight, a survey of artists working in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Zimmerman worked in various curatorial positions largely in university contexts, including the Henry Art Gallery and Jacob Lawrence Gallery, at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA; the Experimental Media and Performing Art Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer in Troy, NY. She was awarded the Loris Ledis Emerging Curatorial Award (2011), an Open Space Curatorial Residency in Busan, Korea (2011), the New Foundation Seattle’s Career Incentive Fund grant (2016), a Banff Literary Arts residency (2016), and a Curatorial Digital Leadership Fellowship from the Association of Art Museum Curators (2023). She writes for BOMB magazine, and has served as a panelist and reviewer for the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, New York State Council on the Arts, the Herb Alpert Awards, among others. Zimmerman is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York with an MA in Curatorial Studies, and New York University with a BA in Visual Studies.
Since its founding over forty years ago, the Arthur Ross Gallery, located in the historic Fisher Fine Arts Library Building on Penn’s campus, has been a space where meaningful programming, resources, and education converge, and where critical and creative expression are considered through the lens of class, gender, history, politics, and race—a dynamic exchange between the university and the public.
About Emily Zimmerman
Emily Zimmerman (she/her) is the Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs at the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania.
She has worked extensively in the contexts of universities, most recently as the Director and 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. She founded the arts journal MONDAY, that commissioned new scholarship and supported emerging arts writers. Prior to joining the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Zimmerman served as the Associate Curator of Programs at the Henry Art Gallery, where much of her work focused on community engagement through institutional partnerships and off-site programming. She began her curatorial career as the Associate Curator at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), commissioning new productions from artists across the visual and performing arts and organizing film and lecture series.
She has curated over 50 commissions, solo, and group exhibitions with artists such as Kerry Tribe, Clotilde Jiménez, Gordon Hall, and others. She has also organized over 300 programs, lecture and film series, performance festivals, workshops, and symposia. She has taught seminars on “Curating Contemporary Art” at the University of Washington and 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.