About the Interviewer

Jill Medvedow is the Director Emerita of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and a lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. At the ICA, Medvedow served as the Ellen Matilda Poss Director from 1998-2025 and is recognized as a national leader in the field of contemporary art and civic life, dramatically altering the landscape for contemporary art in Boston. During her tenure, Medvedow opened the city’s first new art museum in a century; began the museum’s permanent collection; developed a national model for teen arts education; and created the ICA Watershed, transforming a condemned former copper pipe factory into a free and open space for immersive works of art. Under her leadership, the ICA produced influential exhibitions such as Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present; and commissioned major works by artists includingJohn Akomfrah, Sir Hew Locke, and Firelei Báez, generating new scholarship and directions in the arts as well as supporting women artists and artists underrepresented in the art-historical canon. Medvedow served as co-commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the Biennale Artedi Venezia in 2022, presenting the work of Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the U.S.

Medvedow serves as a Trustee at the Rhode Island School of Design and is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts andSciences in 2022; is the subject of an MIT Sloan School of Management Case Study on Leadership; she was former Chair of Boston After School and Beyond; and a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School from 2024-2026. She is a regular contributor to WGBH’s The Culture Show, presenting a new literary segment, Read on Arrival.