Julia Siemon is a specialist in early modern European art. Prior to joining Bard Graduate Center, she 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 the Paintings Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her exhibitions, organized for those institutions as well as for Waddesdon Manor and BGC, have considered diverse subjects including historic Japanese textiles, Neoclassical ornament design, Netherlandish silver of the late Renaissance, twentieth-century Swedish and Japanese ceramics, and eighteenth-century British painting. In addition to exhibition catalogues that she has edited, her research has appeared in volumes published by the British Museum Press, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hill Art Foundation, Holburne Museum, and National Museum, Krakow, and in journals including The Burlington Magazine, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Master Drawings. She is also the author of an extensive catalogue raisonné of preparatory drawings by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Johannes Stradanus—a volume 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. At BGC, she has taught Curatorial Thinking: From Object to Exhibition.
Editor, primary author, A Light in the Dark: Joseph Wright of Derby, exh. cat. (J. Paul Getty Museum Press, 2026).
“Reading Stradanus: Newly Uncovered Drawings, Inscriptions, and a Network Revealed,” Master Drawings 64, no. 2 (Summer 2026), 191–212.
Catalogue of Drawings by Johannes Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2025).
With Selena Anders, “Eighteenth-Century Architectural Examinations at the Accademia di San Luca: New Evidence for the Concorsi Clementini,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 84, no. 3 (September 2025): 347–67.
“‘Two Boys with a Bladder’ in the J. Paul Getty Museum and Joseph Wright of Derby’s Early Candlelights,” The Burlington Magazine 167, no. 1464 (2025): 242–57.
“The Galba Tazza,” A Renaissance Treasury: The Schroder Collection at the Holburne Museum, ed. Caterina Badan and Jerry Brotton (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2025), 60–63.
“Julia Siemon on Jacopo Pontormo,” in Highlights: Hill Art Foundation (Hill Art Foundation, 2022), 74–79.
“Rothschild Family Collecting and the Taste for Continental Renaissance Silver in 19th-Century Britain,” in A Royal Renaissance Treasure and Its Afterlives: The Royal Clock Salt, ed. Dora Thornton and Timothy Schroder (British Museum Press, 2021), 98–114.
“A Poetics of Portraiture and the Legacy of Dante and Petrarch,” in The Medici: Portraits and Politics 1512–1570, ed. Keith Christiansen and Carlo Falciani (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021), 161–63, as well as several catalogue entries.
Editor, primary author, The Silver Caesars: A Renaissance Mystery (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017), with essays including “Renaissance Intellectual Culture, Antiquarianism, and Visual Sources,” 46–77, and “Tracing the Origin of the Aldobrandini Tazze,” 78–105.
BGC curator for exhibition travelling from Nationalmuseum, Sweden Wilhelm Kåge & Shōji Hamada: Ceramics Across Borders
Bard Graduate Center
March 4 –June 20, 2027
A Light in The Dark: Joseph Wright of Derby
J. Paul Getty Museum
November 24, 2026 – March 14, 2027
Mr. Pergolesi’s Curious Things: Ornament in 18th-Century Britain
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
October 1, 2022 – January 29, 2023
Nature by Design: Katagami
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
March 30 – October 27, 2019
The Silver Caesars: A Renaissance Mystery
Waddesdon Manor, UK,
April 18 – July 22, 2018
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
December 12, 2017 – March 11, 2018
