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.
