Amy Gilman

Dr. Amy Gilman joined the Chazen in September, 2017. As director of the Chazen, Dr. Gilman oversees all administrative, financial, and curatorial duties for the museum, and has spent her first few years focusing on capacity-building and access. Since Dr. Gilman’s arrival at the Chazen, the staff has grown by 30 percent, unpaid internships have been replaced with paid positions for students, and the museum has revamped its visitor services model and lobby space to be more welcoming to visitors. Dr. Gilman is a progressive leader in the field, and an advocate for the role of the university art museum on campus and in the community.

Prior to the Chazen, Dr. Gilman spent twelve years at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, OH. During this time, she served as the associate curator of modern and contemporary art, the assistant director for collections and exhibitions and curator of modern and contemporary art, associate director, and deputy director. In Toledo, Dr. Gilman oversaw the development of an innovative artist-in-residency program, brought diverse and thought-provoking acquisitions and programming to the museum, and lead a year-long process of developing a master plan for the museum’s 40-acre campus—the first comprehensive plan in the museum’s over 100-year history.

Dr. Gilman is an alumna of the Getty Leadership Institute. She earned her doctorate in art history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; a master of fine arts in photography from Columbia College in Chicago, and a bachelor’s in performance studies from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

In August 2022, President Joe Biden named Dr. Gilman to the National Museum and Libraries Board.

Contact Dr. Gilman: agilman@chazen.wisc.edu

Publications and appearances

• The Era of the Visionary Museum Director is Over…Or it Should Be, Hyperallergic, July 2021

• Museum directors Amy Gilman and John Weber on what COVID-19 has meant to museums. Management Consultant for the Arts, May 2020
• Protecting Art in College Collections, Inside Higher Education, May 2020
• What It Means to Be a University Museum in the Twenty-First Century, essay by Amy Gilman in American Alliance of Museums, February 2020