Photo: Zina Saro-Wiwa

Amy L. Powell has been curator of modern and contemporary art at Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2014. In September 2023, she began a joint appointment as Curator of Campus Arts Research. In this post she will commission 1-3 artworks annually for the U of I campus.

Her projects center anti-colonial, feminist, and queer modes of inquiry, intentionally challenging and envisioning (im)possibilities for institutional transformation. She prioritizes collaborative research with artists and scholars, leveraging campus resources to contextualize and envision the next stages of artists' work.

Powell is trained in the history and theory of lens-based media. She has published and exhibited projects with video artist Zina Saro-Wiwa, sound artists and filmmakers Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, the Irish collective Kennedy Browne, and filmmaker + photographer Zineb Sedira. Her group exhibition on cinematic time in contemporary art, titled Time / Image, grew from her Ph.D. dissertation. She is enamored of process-driven practices across a full range of artistic mediums. In 2017, she organized the first museum exhibition of work by performance artist Autumn Knight.

Her career survey of works on paper by the late abstract painter Louise Fishman considers the artist's processes--transfers, grids, curves, "expressions," and flat folds--for what they enliven in queer feminist community. A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing was exhibited at Krannert Art Museum from August 26, 2021 through February 26, 2022. The catalogue is distributed by Artbook/D.A.P.

From 2014 to 2023, Powell worked with KAM’s outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art, and photography, by soliciting gifts, guiding purchases, and leading on collections priorities. She opened a new permanent gallery at KAM in August 2019 titled Art Since 1948, a reference to the University of Illinois's first exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture.

Previously Cynthia Woods Mitchell Curatorial Fellow at Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Powell organized solo projects with Zineb Sedira, Clarissa Tossin, and Anna Campbell, and was host co-curator for the group exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art. Her exhibition Antena @ Blaffer featured a bookspace, group exhibition, and public programs with the language experimentation and language justice collaborative Antena, comprised of poets/translators/activist interpreters Jen Hofer and JD Pluecker.

Powell’s work has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Henry Luce Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned a Ph.D. in art history in 2012. She serves on dissertation and MFA committees and has taught courses in curatorial practice.

Powell serves on the board of the Louise Fishman Foundation.

I do not work or think alone. Some cherished collaborators include: