Julie Poitras Santos
Flairs
SWS Advisory Board 2020
SWS Advisory Board 2021
Artist, writer and curator Julie Poitras Santos’ transdisciplinary work connects ecological thinking and earth science disciplines with immersive experience and community engagement. Her site-specific work includes video, installation, and public projects. The relationship between site, story, and mobility fuels a range of research and production, investigating the relationship between natural histories and individual story; walking as a form of listening to site; and material agency in an age of climate change.
Poitras Santos’ solo and collaborative work has been exhibited in the Portland Museum of Art, ME; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Extended, Sweden; Queens Museum, NY; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Karlskrona Konsthall, Sweden; Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain; Reykjanesbaer Art Museum, Iceland; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, among others; and at International Walking Art conferences in Spain (2024), Greece (2019) and France (2017). In 2016, with the help of a Kindling Fund Grant through the Warhol Regional Regranting Program, Poitras Santos initiated Platform Projects/Walks, a platform for curating walking artworks within local communities.
In addition to curatorial essays for exhibition publications, her writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Leonardo: MIT Press, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Chart, The Café Review, Living Maps Review, and others. Curatorial projects include co-curating with Catherine Besteman Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways (2018) for the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. Accompanied by a state-wide initiative involving over seventy partners and a symposium, the exhibition was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, with the support of the Onion Foundation, Poitras Santos organized Platform Projects/Walks 2020: ecologies of the local at Speedwell Projects, bringing artists and scientists together for conversations about climate change; in 2023, with Sabine Malcolm, she curated Liveable Worlds, focusing on how artists have long seen environmental disruption as a moment to reimagine and rebuild; and in 2024, with the support of the Collective Futures Fund, she initiated a long-term project with Maria Patricia Tinajero, SOIL CULTURE, that fosters embodied understandings of the environmental and social impacts of soil.
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 (MECA&D) since 2010. She served as Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D from 2019-2023, and lives in Portland, Maine.
Poitras Santos’ solo and collaborative work has been exhibited in the Portland Museum of Art, ME; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Extended, Sweden; Queens Museum, NY; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Karlskrona Konsthall, Sweden; Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain; Reykjanesbaer Art Museum, Iceland; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, among others; and at International Walking Art conferences in Spain (2024), Greece (2019) and France (2017). In 2016, with the help of a Kindling Fund Grant through the Warhol Regional Regranting Program, Poitras Santos initiated Platform Projects/Walks, a platform for curating walking artworks within local communities.
In addition to curatorial essays for exhibition publications, her writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Leonardo: MIT Press, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Chart, The Café Review, Living Maps Review, and others. Curatorial projects include co-curating with Catherine Besteman Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways (2018) for the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. Accompanied by a state-wide initiative involving over seventy partners and a symposium, the exhibition was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, with the support of the Onion Foundation, Poitras Santos organized Platform Projects/Walks 2020: ecologies of the local at Speedwell Projects, bringing artists and scientists together for conversations about climate change; in 2023, with Sabine Malcolm, she curated Liveable Worlds, focusing on how artists have long seen environmental disruption as a moment to reimagine and rebuild; and in 2024, with the support of the Collective Futures Fund, she initiated a long-term project with Maria Patricia Tinajero, SOIL CULTURE, that fosters embodied understandings of the environmental and social impacts of soil.
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 (MECA&D) since 2010. She served as Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D from 2019-2023, and lives in Portland, Maine.