Emily Zimmerman

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.