Curators

Kathleen Ash-Milby

Curator of Native American Art
she/her/hers

Kathleen Ash-Milby is the Curator of Native American Art, where since 2019 she has expanded the Museum’s engagement with Indigenous artists locally, regionally, and nationally. This has included overseeing the acquisition of notable works for the PAM’s collection, including from such artists as Marie Watt (Seneca); Wally Dion (Yellow Quill First Nation/Salteaux); and Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos). Ash-Milby also organized exhibitions featuring the work of artists including Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota, 1915-1983) and Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent) as well as emerging and early career Indigenous artists in the exhibition Mesh (2021).

Prior to joining PAM, Ash-Milby spent 19 years at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York, 11 as Associate Curator. While there, she organized numerous solo and thematic group exhibitions of Native art across a range of media including Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe (2022); Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound (2021); Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist (2015); Meryl McMaster: Second Self (2015); and C. Maxx Stevens: House of Memory (2012).

Ash-Milby has also curated international projects including SITElines.2016: much wider than a line, at SITE Santa Fe (2016); Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous art in motion, Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, Australia (2011); and Edgar Heap of Birds: Most Serene Republics, a collateral project for the 52nd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2007). From 2001 to 2005, she was curator and co-director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City, one of a limited number of community-based nonprofit galleries devoted exclusively to the exhibition of Indigenous and Native American artists in the United States.

Ash-Milby has contributed essays to various publications, most recently The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada (2023), Jeffrey Gibson: Beyond the Horizon (2022), and Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw (2021). She has also written for publications including Art in America and Art Journal.

Ash-Milby’s work has been recognized with three Secretary of the Smithsonian’s Excellence in Research awards and she was a fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership Program in New York in 2015. She served on the boards of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (2007-2012) and the American Indian Community House (2005-2007), and she was the president of the Native American Art Studies Association (2011-2015). A member of the Navajo Nation, she earned her Master of Arts from the University of New Mexico in Native American art history.

Mary Weaver Chapin, Ph.D.

Curator of Prints and Drawings
she/her/hers

Mary Weaver Chapin joined the Portland Art Museum in 2012. She oversees a large and varied collection of more than 20,000 prints, posters, and artists’ books that date from the 15th century to the present. 

She’s responsible for the care, collection, research, and exhibition of prints, and oversees the Haber Study Center in the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts. She’s the founder of the Portland Fine Print Fair, and serves as the president of the national professional organization Print Council of America. 

Dr. Chapin has curated numerous exhibitions at the Museum including the international loan show Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889-1900 in partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art (2021), an exhibition and catalogue that explores the work of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Félix Vallotton. The exhibition catalogue was named one of the best art books of 2021 by The New York Times. Other major exhibitions include Paris 1900: City of Entertainment with Paris Musées, Museums of the City of Paris (2019); and David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress, presented in partnership with the Hockney Foundation and the Portland Opera (2015), among others. In addition, she keeps a busy schedule curating thematic exhibitions that highlight the riches of the permanent collection from the Renaissance to the present. Recent highlights include The Art of Reading: American Publishing Posters of the 1890s (2019-2020);  Kingdom Animalia: Animals in Print from Dürer to Picasso (2017-2018); and Corita Kent: Spiritual Pop (2016); and This Is War! Graphic Arts of the Great War (2014).

A specialist in nineteenth-century French art, Dr. Chapin is a noted expert on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; she was the co-curator of the exhibition Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. which won the Association of Art Museum Curators Annual Prize for Best Museum exhibition in 2005. In 2012, she curated the exhibition Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries, mounted at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.

Chapin is a graduate of Wellesley College and earned her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. She writes and lectures widely on the graphic arts from the eighteenth-century to the present, and is the author of the catalogue raisonné of the graphic work of Warrington Colescott.

Lloyd DeWitt

The Richard and Janet Geary Curator of European & American Art Pre-1930
he/him/his

Lloyd DeWitt was appointed Richard and Janet Geary Curator of European & American Art Pre-1930 at Portland Art Museum in February 2024. He is responsible for the care, research, exhibition, and growth of the Museum’s collection of nearly 2,000 paintings, decorative arts and sculpture up to 1930 in European and American Art.  

Dr. DeWitt has worked in major art museums across North America for more than two decades. Prior to joining PAM, he served as the Chief Curator and Irene Leache Curator of European Art at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Notable highlights from nearly eight years at the Chrysler Museum include organizing exhibitions such as the touring Triumph of Nature (2023), Farm to Table (2024), and Thomas Jefferson, Architect (2019). As Chief Curator he was also instrumental in revising the Chrysler’s collection management policy, streamlining the deaccessioning process, and initiating foundational work on developing a the Goode Works on Paper Study Center. He also worked closely with community partner organizations to bring multiple perspectives to exhibitions and programs, including leading engagement with the local Native American community in Norfolk.  

At the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada, where Dr. DeWitt served as Curator of European Art from 2011 to 2016, he organized exhibitions on Michelangelo, J. M. W. Turner, and Wilhelm Hammershøi, while also acquiring two of the most significant works of European art in the history of Canadian museums. Dr. DeWitt also previously held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2003 to 2011.  

Dr. DeWitt is a visiting adjunct professor at Old Dominion University. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Maryland, College Park, an MA in Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a BA in Fine Art from the University of Guelph in Canada.

Julia Dolan, Ph.D.

The Minor White Senior Curator of Photography
she/her/hers

Julia Dolan has curated, co-curated, or hosted more than 45 photography exhibitions since joining the Portland Art Museum in 2010. She also oversees research of and acquisitions for the permanent collection, which currently numbers over 10,000 photographs. She is a member of the Museum’s Equity Team, and was a co-founder of the FOCUS group, a North American network of emerging photography curators, historians, and nonprofit professionals.

Dr. Dolan’s exhibitions at the Museum include Perspectives (2020), Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal… (with Sara Krajewski, 2019-20), Toughened to Wind and Sun: Women Photographing the Landscape (2019-20), In the Beginning: Minor White’s Oregon Photographs (2017-2018), Representing: Vernacular Photographs of, by, and for African Americans (2017), Contemporary Native Photographers and the Edward Curtis Legacy: Zig Jackson, Wendy Red Star, Will Wilson (with Dr. Deana Dartt, 2016), and Blue Sky: The Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts at 40 (2014). She has published essays in multiple publications including Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal… (2018), Sun, Shadows, Stone: The Photography of Terry Toedtemeier (2018), Geolocation: Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman (2015), Blue Sky: The Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts at 40 (2014), and The Question of Hope: Robert Adams in Western Oregon (2013).

Dr. Dolan earned a B.F.A. in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, an M.A. in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, and a Ph.D. in Art History from Boston University. She has worked with the photography collections at institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.

Amy Dotson

Director, PAM CUT// Center for an Untold Tomorrow
Curator of Film and New Media
she/her/hers

Amy Dotson is Director of the Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) and inaugural curator of film & new media at the Museum. Championing cinematic storytelling in all its forms, Dotson oversees PAM CUT’s exhibition, artist services, and educational programming that includes an expansive media arts approach to film, series, animation, audio, gaming, XR, and multi-media performance. She also initiated the annual Cinema Unbound Awards, honoring artists and innovators working at the intersection of art and cinema who are not content to be contained. 

Exhibitions to date have included the U.S. premiere of Symbiosis (2022) and the PAM special exhibition Guillermo del Toro’s Crafting Pinocchio (2022) in partnership with MOMA. In both 2021 & 2022, PAM & PAM CUT were the sole U.S. venues of the Venice Biennale’s XR Expanded program featuring virtual reality and mixed reality from around the globe. 

She also works as one of the founding Group Leaders of the prestigious Venice Biennale College Cinema, a story architect at the Venice Biennale’s XR program, and was the former Head of Studies at Doha Film Institute’s Series Lab.

For thirteen years prior, she was the Deputy Director & Head of Programming for IFP, nurturing over 10,000 artists and debut projects-in-development including Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Dee Rees’ Pariah, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Daniel Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12, and Chloe Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Her responsibilities included the financial and creative oversight of all domestic and international programming, partnerships and memberships for the organization’s signature programs. She oversaw the yearly selection of over 150 fiction & non-fiction media arts works in progress for support and managed 18 international partners in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and Canada, creating custom programming for their producers, showrunners and filmmakers throughout the year. She also managed the talent and juries for the IFP’s Gotham Awards, which kicks off US cinema awards season each year and was one of three key staff leaders to help secure, create and launch the Made in NY Media Center by IFP, a 22,000 square foot talent incubator for creators at the intersection of story and tech in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Dotson also most recently produced Bo McGuire’s 2020 Tribeca Grand Jury Prize Documentary Feature Winner, Socks on Fire, as well as Brad Beesley’s feature documentary, Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo (SXSW 2009; HBO and BBC). She was a supervising producer for Matt Porterfield’s feature I Used To Be Darker (Sundance 2013; Strand Releasing) and worked closely with director Tim Sutton as a producing advisor on doc/narrative hybrid, Memphis (Sundance 2014; Kino Lorber).

She was the 2019 Keynote Speaker at BAM Cinemafest as well as at the 2015 Seattle Film Festival Catalyst Program. Dotson has served as a juror and mentor at a wide variety of festivals such as Atlanta, Ashland, IDFA, IndieMemphis, Istanbul, Karlovy Vary, Slamdance, Sidewalk, SXSW, Woodstock, and World Air Guitar Championships in Oluu, Finland.

She has also been a butterfly wrangler, fashion stylist, welder, art director’s assistant and freelance writer for publications such as Filmmaker Magazine, Maisonneuve and BUST Magazine. She graduated from NYU with a Masters in Media Ecology where she studied the intersection of media, art and technology and holds a duel undergrad degree in communications and fine arts from Wake Forest University. 

Brian J. Ferriso

Director and Chief Curator
he/him/his

As the Director and Chief Curator of the Portland Art Museum, Brian Ferriso is responsible for leading all aspects of the institution, including the curatorial divisions, exhibitions, acquisitions, collections, learning and community partnerships, public programs, PAM CUT, financial and strategic planning, human resources, Board of Trustees, and government and community relations. Since his appointment in 2006 the Museum has thrived under his guiding principles of art, access, and accountability.

Under Ferriso’s leadership the Museum has launched a diverse schedule of exhibitions and publications that have featured important works of art and presented new scholarship, with the goal of bringing art from around the world to Oregon as well as introducing the world to the art of the region. Exhibitions of special note during Ferriso’s tenure are: Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957 (2008), The Artist’s Touch, The Craftsman’s Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from Portland Art Museum (2011-12), Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (2013), The Question of Hope: Robert Adams in Western Oregon (2013-14), The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden (2104), The Enclave: Richard Mosse (2014-15), and Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection (2015) Ferriso also conceived of Masterworks/Portland, a series of single-work exhibitions, and has curated Raphael’s La Donna Velata (2009), Thomas Moran’s Shoshone Falls on the Snake River (2010), and Titian’s La Bella (2011-12). Ferriso is also responsible for launching a series of highly successful design-focused exhibitions that explore the influence of art and design on architecture, fashion, consumer goods, and luxury products. Highlights include China Design Now (2009), The Allure of the Automobile (2011), Cyclepedia: Iconic Bicycle Design (2013), and Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945 (2015). Major acquisitions for the collection under Ferriso’s tenure include works by Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt van Rijn, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. Ferriso has been published in a number of exhibition catalogs and art publications, and has written articles for Curator: The Museum Journal and Museum magazine.

Committed to learning and expanding free admission opportunities, Ferriso has created the Art Access Endowment, which supports in perpetuity free admission for children 17 and under, free school tours, and quarterly family free days. During Ferriso’s tenure, the Museum has operated with a balanced budget, added over $25m million in new gifts to the endowment, and eliminated $7 million in unfunded debt.

Ferriso received a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College, a M.A. in arts administration from New York University, and an M.A. in art history from the University of Chicago. He is a past Trustee and President (2016-2017) of the Association of Art Museum Directors; a Trustee of the American Federation of Arts and Chair of its exhibitions committee; and a member of American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and CEO, Chief Executive Organization.  Ferriso is the recipient of the 2012 Excellency Award from the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture, and a member of the International Council Museum Berggruen Berlin. Previously, he was a Chief Executive Fellow at National Arts Strategies, a mentor and applicant reviewer for the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a Juror for the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Institute of Architects’ National Honor Awards, and as a Site Reviewer for AAM’s Accreditation Program. Additionally, Ferriso is a practicing artist, using training that he acquired while studying with Frank Mason of the Art Students League in New York City.

Erin Grant

Assistant Curator of Native American Art
she/her/hers

Erin Grant was appointed the Assistant Curator of Native American Art in 2023. Her responsibilities include assisting with the museum’s NAGPRA compliance and the planning for the major redesign and re-installation of the Native American permanent collection galleries.

Erin Grant is a member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes with family at Hopi, the Gila River and throughout Phoenix, Arizona. She holds a Bachelor’s in History from Seattle University. As a 2019 graduate of The History of Design & Curatorial Studies M.A. program offered through The New School and the Smithsonian Design Museum, she specializes in Native American art and design, and American material culture. She completed internships at the New-York Historical Society, American Federation of Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Indian Arts Research Center (School for Advanced Research). She recently completed her fellowship at PAM as the IMLS Curatorial & Community Partnerships Fellow where she assisted with the exhibition development of Jeffrey Gibson: They Come From Fire and led local community outreach to the Native communities in Greater Portland.

“As an Indigenous scholar and museum professional, I have always strived to be the bridge connecting institutions and their audiences to the worlds and cultures they reflect. I am guided by community collaboration and outreach methodologies. As I seek more growth opportunities, I am eager to continue my work in the prioritization of Native voices and to contribute my voice on a bigger scale at the Portland Art Museum.”  Erin Grant

Jeannie Kenmotsu, Ph.D.

The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art
she/her/hers

Jeannie Kenmotsu was appointed The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art in 2020. Dr. Kenmotsu oversees an active program of exhibitions, research, interpretation, and development of the Asian art collections of the Museum, comprising nearly 6,000 works of art ranging from historical to contemporary. 

At PAM, Dr. Kenmotsu has organized the exhibitions Forces of Nature: Ecology in Japanese Prints (2022), Shades of Light: Korean Art from the Collection (2022), Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, 1956–1965: Japan’s Women Printmakers, Objects of Contact: Encounters between Japan and the West (both 2020–21), Dramatic Impressions: Japanese Actor Prints (2019), Suzuki Harunobu and the Culture of Color (2018), and Craftsmanship and Wit (2017). She is currently organizing the first major museum retrospective of the artist Yoshida Chizuko (1924–2017). 

Dr. Kenmotsu holds particular expertise in color printing and illustrated books in the eighteenth century, and specializes in Japanese art of the Edo period (1615–1868). Recent publications include a book chapter on collecting history, “Prints for Portland: The Mary Andrews Ladd Collection” in Great Waves and Mountains: Collecting the Arts of Japan (University Press of Florida, 2022) and a co-authored technical study on colorants in the prints of Suzuki Harunobu (Heritage Science 10:1, 2022). Previous academic and curatorial appointments include Scripps College and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she assisted with Ink and Gold: Art of the Kano, a major international loan exhibition of Japanese painting.

Dr. Kenmotsu is a Senior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Japanese Art Society of America. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Japan Foundation, and Blakemore Foundation, among others. Dr. Kenmotsu earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania and received a B.A. in English from Pomona College. 

Grace Kook-Anderson

The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art
she/her/hers

Grace Kook-Anderson was appointed The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art in 2017. At the Portland Art Museum she is responsible for the Northwest Art Collection and Galleries, the APEX exhibition series, and the regional survey, most recently entitled, the map is not the territory (2019). The APEX series features solo exhibitions and projects of contemporary northwest artists. APEX artists include Sam Hamilton (2017), Dawn Cerny (2017), Hannah Piper Burns (2018), Avantika Bawa (2018), Steven Young Lee (2019), Laura Fritz (2019), Ed Bereal (2020), and Sharita Towne (2021). Kook-Anderson has focused on presenting works from the Museum’s permanent collection of northwest art to form thematic exhibits including Picturing Oregon (2017-2019), Portraiture from the Collection of Northwest Art (in collaboration with artist Storm Tharp) (2019-current), and Isaka Shamsud-Din: Rock of Ages (2019-current). Kook-Anderson was the coordinating curator for Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati before traveling to the Portland Art Museum (2020-2021).Prior to joining the museum, she was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art in the School of Art + Design at Portland State University while working as an independent curator and arts writer. From 2008-2015, Kook-Anderson was the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Laguna Art Museum. Highlights of her tenure at Laguna Art Museum include a site-specific commission, An Elongated Now by Lita Albuquerque, for the museum’s 2nd Art & Nature festival (2014). Kook-Anderson curated Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971 in conjunction with Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Initiative, and produced the accompanying award-winning catalog (2011). Kook-Anderson received a dual B.A. degree in art history and art practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and received her M.A. degree in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has held prior positions at the Asian Art Museum and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.

Sara Krajewski

The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
she/her/hers

Sara Krajewski has been with the Portland Art Museum since August 2015. Sara activates the contemporary art program through exhibitions, commissions, acquisitions, performances and publications. She also fosters collaborations that bring together artists, curators, educators, and the public to ask questions around access, equity, and new institutional models. 

Recent curatorial projects include: Hito Steyerl: This is the Future; Opacity of Performance: Takahiro Yamamoto; Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal…; We.Construct.Marvels.Between.Monuments.; Josh Kline: Freedom; and Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene. 

From 2012 – 2015, Sara was the Director of INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she curated an array of interdisciplinary exhibitions and performances. Sara was also curator at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle from 2004 – 2012, where she focused on solo artist projects and group exhibitions exploring photography’s impact on visual culture.

Krajewski holds degrees in Art History from the University of Wisconsin (BA) and Williams College (MA) and has held prior positions at the Harvard Art Museum and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Krajewski was awarded a curatorial research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and has received arts leadership training through the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) and the Center for Curatorial Leadership (2019).