Amy Gilman

Amy Gilman, Ph.D., is a progressive leader and advocate for the role of the university art museum on campus, in the community and in the field. She joined the Chazen Museum of Art in 2017 as director. In 2024, the University of Wisconsin–Madison named her senior director for the arts and media. In this role, she assumes additional oversight of the Division of the Arts, Wisconsin Public Media and UW Press. She works closely with the provost to strategically align arts units and raise the profile of the arts on campus.

Her Hyperallergic editorial, “The Era of the Visionary Museum Director is Over…or It Should Be,” published in 2021, firmly positioned her as a change-maker in the museum sector. In it, she calls for a shift from charismatic leadership to practical, collaborative leadership. In 2022, Gilman was appointed by President Joe Biden to serve on the National Museum and Library Services Board. In 2025, she was selected to serve on the Association of Art Museum Directors board, underscoring her commitment to arts advocacy at all levels of the profession.

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 complicated 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. Additionally, after arriving at the Chazen, Gilman restructured and grew 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 the community and dramatically expanded the museum’s hours to seven days a week.

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

• The Era of the Visionary Museum Director is Over…Or it Should Be, Hyperallergic

• 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