Amy Gilman, PhD, joined the Chazen Museum of Art in September 2017. Since her arrival, Gilman has restructured and grown the staff and replaced unpaid internships with paid positions. She also reimagined the museum’s lobby and store as a coffee shop and gathering place for museum visitors and the community, and dramatically expanded the museum’s hours to seven days a week.
Gilman is a progressive leader and an advocate for the role of the university art museum on campus, in the community and in the field. In 2024, Gilman was named senior director for the arts and media. Gilman remains the director of the Chazen and has additional oversight of the Division of the Arts, Wisconsin Public Media and UW Press. In this capacity, Gilman works closely with the provost to strategically align arts units at UW–Madison and raise the profile of the arts on campus.
Gilman is committed to positioning museums as locations to promote experimentation, and she often uses her work to pilot changes in current museum models. This manifested in the “re:mancipation” project, which reimagined how to engage with and reinterpret a problematic object in the museum’s permanent collection. The project received widespread media attention and acclaim, including articles in “The New York Times” and Forbes.com. In August 2022, Gilman was appointed by President Joe Biden to serve a five-year term on the National Museum and Library Services Board.
Prior to the Chazen, Gilman spent 12 years at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio where she served as deputy director, assistant director for collections and exhibitions and curator of modern and contemporary art. Gilman is an alumna of the Getty Leadership Institute. She earned her doctorate in art history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio; a master of fine arts in photography from Columbia College in Chicago; and a bachelor’s degree in performance studies from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Contact Dr. Gilman: agilman@chazen.wisc.edu
Publications and appearances
- Museum directors Amy Gilman and John Weber on what COVID-19 has meant to museums. Management Consultant for the Arts
- Protecting Art in College Collections, Inside Higher Education
- What It Means to Be a University Museum in the Twenty-First Century, American Alliance of Museums
More About Amy
- Meet Amy Gilman (video)
- Amy Gilman Leads the Chazen Forward, Brava Magazine