About

Betty Julian is the interim Director and Senior Curator at McMaster Museum of Art, bringing over 30 years of experience working in the visual arts in many diverse capacities, including as independent curator of contemporary art, art educator and consultant.

Julian has developed a specialization and expertise in photography, film, and video from her years of working at renowned Canadian art institutions including at Prefix ICA as Adjunct Curator (2019 to 2021), and as Assistant Professor and Sessional Faculty in the Photography program at OCAD University (2001 to 2015). Her multi-disciplinary curatorial practice concentrates on the aesthetic, critical and cultural interrogation of still and moving images and places emphasis on the critical and transcultural discourses on colonialism and the intersectional dialogues on gender, representation, and psychoanalytic thought.

Born in Halifax, Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia) and based in Toronto, Julian is of the Black diaspora and is an off-reserve citizen of Sipekne’katik First Nation in Mi’kma’ki, on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq Nation. She began her professional arts career in 1988, when she assumed the role of Administrative Coordinator and then director of A Space, a pioneering artist-run centre in Toronto.

Since 2004, she has been a member of the curatorial council for Prefix ICA, where she curated 31 by Lorna Simpson (2005), the group exhibition Trade Marks (2013), Facing by Renée Green, her first solo exhibition in Canada (2016), and the group exhibition Movers and Shakers (2018). As Adjunct Curator she curated Listen, speak and sing (2019) a solo exhibition of new artworks by Nadia Myre, Mirage (2020) a solo exhibition by Toronto based artist Lyla Rye and Movers and Makers (2021) a group exhibition that toured to McMaster Museum of Art (2022). With Pamela Edmonds, she has co-curated the M(M)A critical collection exhibition Chasm (2023).