Julie Poitras Santos is an artist, writer, curator, and currently the Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, in Portland, Maine. As an artist, her site-specific practice includes video, installation, texts, and public projects. As a curator, her work is interdisciplinary and community focused, seeking to bring artworks and people together in dialogue. Her exhibition, Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways (2018), co-curated with Catherine Besteman for the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design, was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and included a statewide initiative with over 70 offsite events. In 2016, Poitras Santos initiated Platform Projects/Walks, an ongoing platform for curating walking artworks within local communities; this project has been supported by a Kindling Fund Grant through Space Gallery and the Warhol Regional Regranting Program, and by the Onion Foundation.
Since 2019, as Director of Exhibitions for the ICA at Maine College of Art & Design, Poitras Santos has curated numerous exhibitions, including Some Things We Can Do Together: Megan & Murray McMillan (2020), ACOUSTIC RESONANCE (2020), Tory Fair: Portable Window (2021), Parallax/Geography (2021), DOUBLE TROUBLE (2021), MONITOR: Data, Surveillance, and the New Panoptic (2021), and A Fresh Greeting is Heard (2022). She is currently working with Daisy Desrosiers, Director and Chief Curator of the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, on the upcoming exhibition, Sympathy for the translator (2022) which will travel from the ICA at MECA&D to the Gund Gallery in 2023.
Poitras Santos’ artwork has been exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, ME (2021); Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) Extended, Sweden (2019); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2019, 2021); Queens Museum, NY (2018); Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME (2018); Karlskrona Konsthall, Sweden (2017); Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona, Spain (2008); Reykjanesbaer Art Museum, Keflavik, Iceland (2006); and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO (2002), among others. Her writing has been published in numerous exhibition publications, as well as in the Brooklyn Rail, Leonardo: MIT Press, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Chart, The Café Review, Living Maps Review, and The New Guard. Poitras Santos has taught visual art since 1995, serving as a professor of Studio Art in the MFA program at Maine College of Art & Design since 2010.
