Bard Graduate Center has announced the appointment of Dr. Julia Siemon to the position of deputy director, a newly created role within the institution’s leadership team. Since joining BGC in 2024 as director of exhibitions and chief curator, Siemon has overseen its acclaimed exhibition program and contributed significantly to its intellectual life, advancing its commitment to decorative arts, design history, and material culture. In her new role, Siemon will continue to lead the BGC Gallery while assuming expanded responsibility for the institution’s operations and departments that bridge its academic and gallery programs, such as publications, public programs, and digital projects.

“Julia has had an extraordinary impact on Bard Graduate Center in her brief tenure, from guiding a rigorous and thought-provoking curatorial program to strengthening global partnerships,” said Dr. Susan Weber, director and founder of Bard Graduate Center. “Her astute judgment and steady leadership made her appointment as deputy director a natural and enthusiastic decision, enhancing our ability to carry out BGC’s mission with even greater focus.”

During her time at BGC, Siemon has overseen the institution’s roster of exhibitions and catalogues exploring the cultural history of the material world, including Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today (2025), Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds (on view through May 24, 2026), and the forthcoming Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film (opening September 18, 2026). She has also been instrumental in managing and stewarding the gallery’s historic building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As a champion of BGC’s rapidly growing study collection, she has played an essential part in shaping a vision for the institution’s future as an internationally recognized hub for object-based learning. Her work at BGC has also extended into the classroom, where she has provided students with practical and theoretical insights into the many aspects of curatorial work. At the same time, she strengthened pathways that expand student access to the BGC Gallery and the expertise of its dedicated professional teams.

“I am honored to step into this role at Bard Graduate Center, a remarkable institution I hold in the highest esteem,” said Siemon. “BGC nurtures intellectual curiosity across disciplines and boundaries of time, place, and medium—fostering meaningful engagement with objects through our classes, programs, exhibitions, publications, and more. It is a privilege to learn alongside my talented colleagues and our inquisitive students, and I look forward to supporting their work.”

A specialist in early modern European art, Siemon previously held curatorial appointments in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Department of Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and, most recently, in the Paintings Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her exhibitions, organized for those institutions—as well as for Waddesdon Manor—have considered diverse subjects including historic Japanese textiles, Neoclassical ornament design, Netherlandish silver of the late Renaissance, and eighteenth-century British painting.

In addition to catalogues accompanying these exhibitions, Siemon’s research has appeared in volumes published by the British Museum Press, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hill Art Foundation, the Holburne Museum, and the National Museum, Krakow, and in journals including The Burlington Magazine and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. She is also the author of an extensive catalogue raisonée of preparatory drawings by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Johannes Stradanus, published digitally by Cooper Hewitt. Her scholarship has been recognized through grants, fellowships, and awards from the Getty Foundation’s Paper Project, The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, the Medici Archive Project, the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, and others. She holds a PhD in Italian Renaissance art from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she served as part-time core lecturer for several years.