Jamilee Lacy is an art museum leader, curator and writer committed to today's art and artists.

As of March 2023, she is also the Executive Director of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. She was previously the inaugural Director and Chief Curator of Providence College Galleries, where she oversaw contemporary art exhibitions, collections, publications, educational programs, public art, and more. She is a commissioning curator of The Trustees’ Art & Landscape program, for which she organized “Counterculture,” a public art installation by Rose B. Simpson on the ancestral lands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans; “Counterculture” is traveling to sights across the country through 2025. In 2020, Lacy received a curatorial research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in support of her forthcoming exhibition project Digital River, Burning Mountain: Shanshui Art Now. Her curatorial projects have been discussed in Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, Artnet.com, The Boston Globe, L.A. Times, New York Times, and Hyperallergic, among other publications.

On behalf of Providence College Galleries, Lacy also co-founded two cooperative organizations: Interlace Grant Fund and My HomeCourt. She serves on the executive committee for Interlace, which annually funds nearly $100,000 of emergency and project grants for Providence visual artists. For My HomeCourt, a public art initiative produced in collaboration with City of Providence Parks and Providence College alums, she sits on the board of directors and leads the curation of court mural projects. In late 2023, Lacy will curate a court mural for Providence’s Ninth Street Courts designed by Sanford Biggers.

Lacy previously held positions in curatorial and education departments at Northwestern University and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City; and DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, Czech Republic. She was managing editor at Bad at Sports and founding director of Twelve Galleries Project (2008 - 2013). She co-produced (with Meg Onli) Remaking the Black Metropolis: Contemporary Art, Urbanism and Blackness in America, a research survey and digital archive with support provided by the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of Fine Arts. In addition to authoring and editing numerous catalogue essays and exhibition publications, she has written for Flash Art, Umelec Magazine, Art 21 Magazine and Art in America. Lacy holds a dual-degree BFA in Studio Art and Art History, Theory & Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in Comparative Art & Literature from Northwestern University, and was a Class of 2022 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

She lives in Seattle with her husband, the conceptual artist Stephen Lacy of Academy Records, and their two cats Judy and Sweety.

Photo: Justin James Muir, 2019.