Julie Rodrigues Widholm is Director and Chief Curator of DePaul Art Museum where she leads the strategic and artistic vision to promote equity and interdisciplinary education in the arts, while positioning Chicago as a global art city. Her work seeks to expand the canon by providing a platform for marginalized practices, voices and experiences, with a focus on women and artists from Latin America and DePaul Art Museum is about to embark on a 3-year Latinx initative. She has organized solo exhibitions with Doris Salcedo, Amalia Pica, and Firelei Baez, and group exhibitions such as Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City and Unbound: Contemporary Art after Frida Kahlo. Prior to taking the helm at DPAM in September 2015, she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art for sixteen years. Her curatorial projects have been presented at DePaul Art Museum, MCA Chicago, Miami Art Museum, the High Museum, Perez Art Museum, the Nasher Museum at Duke University, MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum at Washington University, and the Nasher Sculpture Center.
Rodrigues Widholm has authored or contributed to more than 25 publications. In 2015 and 2017, she was named one of Chicago’s ART50 Visual Vanguard by New City. During the 2016-2017 academic year, she was a Senior Fellow in the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She has served as a juror and panelist for organizations including USA Artists, Headlands Center for the Arts, 3 Arts, McKnight Foundation, Artadia, Creative Capital, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and the Peggy Nohl Fellowship, among others. She has been a visiting critic at national universities, a graduate advisor, and given numerous public talks. She holds a BA in Art History and Political Science from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and an MA in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute.