SAN DIEGO, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego announced the promotion of Curator Jill Dawsey, PhD, to the position of Senior Curator after a decade at the institution, along with the appointment of Assistant Curator Isabel Casso, who joins MCASD from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. MCASD operates two locations, one in the heart of downtown San Diego and the other in the coastal community of La Jolla, which over the past four years has undergone a major renovation and expansion by Selldorf Architects and will reopen in April, 2022.

Says Kathryn Kanjo, David C. Copley Director and CEO of MCASD, “Jill Dawsey’s intellectual rigor and emotional sensitivity infuse her curatorial practice. Engaging and supportive, she is a valued colleague as well as a true scholar. Her projects tap her academic expertise as they expand MCASD’s history. Exhibitions such as The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium and Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s, while historical in nature, reveal themes that resonate in the present moment.”

Comments Dawsey, “It was such a thrill, ten years ago, to join my hometown contemporary art museum, which played a key role in my education as a young person. It has been a great honor to grow with this institution and to work with the incredible artistic communities of the San Diego-Tijuana region. I’m excited to be part of MCASD at this transformative moment, as we reopen our flagship and strive to become a newly generative and welcoming space for our audiences.”




During the past ten years, Jill Dawsey has organized over twenty exhibitions at MCASD, including such hallmark shows as The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium (2016-2017), an exhibition examining a network of conceptual artists who were active in San Diego between the late 1960s and early 1980s, including Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Carrie Mae Weems. Dawsey is the curator of Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist, the first solo museum presentation of the work of the late Yolanda López (1942-2021), the Chicana artist and activist celebrated for her Guadalupe series. Currently on view at MCASD's Jacob's Building downtown, the exhibition explores the artist’s influential feminist corpus of the 1970s and 1980s. Alongside Michelle White, Senior Curator, The Menil Collection, Dawsey is the co-curator of Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s, the first exhibition to focus on the experimental work of the French-American artist during this pivotal decade, from her Tirs, or “shooting paintings,” to the exuberant sculptures of women she called Nanas. Currently on view at The Menil Collection in Houston, the exhibition opens at MCASD's newly expanded La Jolla flagship on April 9, 2022 and will feature numerous works from European collections, many seen in the United States for the first time. Dawsey was also the curator of Laugh-in: Art, Comedy, Performance (2015), which explored the work of artists who use strategies of stand-up comedy to reframe issues of performance, audience, and public speech. Together with MCASD Associate Curator Anthony Graham, she organized the 2018 exhibition Being Here with You/ Estando aquí contigo: 42 Artists from San Diego and Tijuana, a survey of artists and collectives living and working on both sides of the border. Dawsey helped to establish MCASD’s IDEA task force in 2019 and has been central to the Museum’s renewed commitment to serve the binational audiences of the San Diego-Tijuana region.

Born and raised in San Diego, Dawsey received her Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University, her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, and was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Previously, she held curatorial posts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) at the University of Utah. At Utah, she established salt, an ongoing exhibition series on emerging international artists. Dawsey has organized one-person exhibitions with artists including Scoli Acosta, Edgar Arceneaux, Andrea Chung, Colter Jacobsen, Adriana Lara, Yve Laris Cohen, and Xaviera Simmons, among others. She has taught curatorial practice at the California College of the Arts and art history at the University of Utah, San Francisco Art Institute, and UC Irvine.

Isabel Casso joins MCASD as Assistant Curator following her previous role as the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the MCA Chicago, where she organized Grain of a Hand: Drawings with Graphite and a solo exhibition of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. She has held positions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Casso received her MA in the History of Art from Williams College and a BA in Art History and Economics from Loyola Marymount University.

Continues Kanjo, “We are delighted to welcome Isabel Casso, a rising talent with previous stops at SFMOMA and MCA Chicago, whose work with Latinx artists connects well with MCASD’s program. We are excited she is bringing her curatorial practice to our binational community.”