Lauren Schell Dickens

Lauren Schell Dickens is chief curator at the San José Museum of Art. Since joining the museum in 2016, she has organized solo exhibitions and projects with Diana Al-Hadid, Sofia Cordova, Woody de Othello, Brendan Fernandes, Glenn Kaino, and The Propeller Group, and group exhibitions including Our whole, unruly selves (2021), Other Walks, Other Lines (2018), and The House Imaginary (2018). Her major monographic exhibitions Kelly Akashi: Formations (2022) and Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (2018-2019), co-curated with Jodi Throckmorton, have toured nationally. Since 2020 she has been collaborating with the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz on Visualizing Abolition, producing solo exhibitions with Sky Hopinka, Sadie Barnette, and Forensic Architecture, and the major exhibition Seeing Through Stone. Prior to joining SJMA, Dickens held curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her public project with The Propeller Group and El Mac was awarded the 2018 Creative Impact Award by the city of San José. She is a 2019 Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow and a recipient of the Fellows of Contemporary Art 2022 Curators Award. She holds degrees from Yale University and Columbia University.