Art Curators

Margot Norton

Chief Curator

Margot Norton is Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she leads the curatorial team and oversees the exhibition program. She was previously Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where she recently co-curated the 2021 New Museum Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone; Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined; and Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente. At the New Museum, she has also curated solo exhibitions with Carmen Argote, Diedrick Brackens, Pia Camil, Sarah Charlesworth, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sarah Lucas, Goshka Macuga, Chris Ofili, Laure Prouvost, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Kaari Upson and Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, among others, and group exhibitions including The Keeper, Here and Elsewhere, and NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. In 2017, she curated the Eighth Sequences Real Time Art Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Georgian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with artist Anna K.E. She also serves on the editorial committee of Museums Moving Forward (MMF), an intergenerational, cross-institutional coalition of art museum professionals committed to advancing equity across the museum field. Before joining the New Museum in 2011, Norton was a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has contributed to and edited numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, and regularly lectures on contemporary art and curating. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University, New York. 

Claire Frost

Curatorial Associate

Curatorial Associate Claire Frost has worked in the Bay Area since 2011 and has held positions at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, ArtSpan, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Intersection for the Arts. She has presented her research at the College Art Association Annual Conference (2018, and 2021), and the Common Field Convening (2020). She received her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Her graduate studies focused on the intersection of identity and historiography in relation to second wave feminism and conceptual art. She is the founder and curator of the apartment galleries COLLABO in Chicago, and Claire Frost in San Francisco.

Anthony Graham

Senior Curator

Anthony Graham is Senior Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where he focuses on the museum collection. He was previously Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. He recently organized Alexis Smith: The American Way, the first exhibition and publication of the Los Angeles-based artist in thirty years. He has also curated solo exhibitions with artists Griselda Rosas, Nancy Lupo, and Sadie Barnette. Other recent exhibitions include Bound to the Earth: Art, Materiality, and the Natural World and Being Here with You/ Estando aquí contigo: 42 Artists from San Diego and Tijuana. His writing has been included in several exhibition catalogs and online journals including HereIn and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Matthew Villar Miranda

Curatorial Associate

Matthew Villar Miranda (he/they/siya) joined BAMPFA in 2023 and formerly worked as the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center where they co-organized exhibitions by Pao Houa Her, Paul Chan, and Pacita Abad. They serve on the board of Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative of an intergenerational, cross-institutional coalition of art museum professionals committed to advancing equity across the museum field. They co-curated the Art for Justice Fund-supported exhibition Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration at the Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). They received their BA in History of Art from UC Berkeley (2013) and graduated among the inaugural Class of ASU-Los Angeles County Museum of Art Master's Fellowship in Art History (2021). They research queer intimacies and decolonial interventions by artists of the imagined and material tropics.

Victoria Sung

Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator

Victoria Sung is the Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she oversees the museum's long-standing MATRIX series of contemporary art and works with artists to create exhibitions, publications, and public programs. From 2015 to 2023, she was Associate Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where she organized large-scale artist surveys and retrospectives, including Pacita Abad (2023), Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall (2019), and Siah Armajani: Follow This Line (2018). She also commissioned artists to make new works for the museum, including Pao Houa Her, Candice Lin, Laure Prouvost, Rayyane Tabet, and Shen Xin, among others. She regularly gives talks on modern and contemporary art and contributes her writing to exhibition catalogs, including most recently at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Chisenhale Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Elaine Y. Yau

Associate Curator

Elaine Y. Yau is associate curator of the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA, where she is organizing an exhibition from Eli Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts for fall 2024. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersection of discourses on folk art, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Film Curators

Susan Oxtoby

Director of Film and Senior Film Curator

Since her appointment as Senior Film Curator in 2005, Susan Oxtoby has organized several major film series for BAMPFA, including retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Beavers, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Satyajit Ray, and Agnès Varda, among others. In 2014, Oxtoby co-curated Discovering Georgian Cinema, the largest retrospective of Georgian film ever mounted in North America. Prior to her arrival at BAMPFA, Oxtoby was director of programming at Cinematheque Ontario, the year-round public screening division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group (TIFFG). In 2005 and again in 2010, she was appointed to five-year terms on the National Film Preservation Board, which advises the Library of Congress on films to be named to the National Registry. From 2001 to 2005, she served as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). Oxtoby has directed two independent films, All Flesh Is Grass (1988) and January 15, 1991: Gulf War Diary (1992). In 2015 she was honored with a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication for her help furthering the arts in France and throughout the world, and a Medal of Honor by the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

Kathy Geritz

Film Curator

Film Curator Kathy Geritz focuses on international documentary, avant-garde, and independent film. In 2010, with Steve Anker and Steve Seid, Geritz edited the major book Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000 and organized the companion film series, which toured nationally. Geritz was the 2015 International Curator in Residence at the new Len Lye Centre in New Zealand; in 2013 she gave special presentations at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival and the Ambulante Film Festival, and in 2012 she guest curated programs for the Ann Arbor Film Festival and The Brakhage Center Symposium. Geritz is a member of the Flaherty Film Seminar’s programming committee and teaches a course on film curating in the Department of Film and Media at UC Berkeley.

Kathryn MacKay

Associate Film Curator

Prior to coming to BAMPFA in 2016, MacKay served as the programmer and interim artistic director of The Images Festival in Toronto, one of North America’s largest festivals of alternative cinema and media art. MacKay’s programming activities have also included positions as guest curator at the Ryerson Image Centre; guest programmer for TIFF Cinematheque; programming associate for Wavelengths, Toronto International Film Festival; and curator of installations for The 8Fest. She cofounded Early Monthly Segments, a screening series that presents historical and contemporary experimental works, and has served as the chair of the Board of Directors of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT). Her wide-ranging areas of interest span historical and contemporary periods with an emphasis on independent film.