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Our Juror
Maria Ferguson
Director, Bruce Gallery
PennWest University—Edinboro
Maria Ferguson is Director of the Bruce Gallery and Instructor of Art at PennWest University—Edinboro in Edinboro, PA. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions of modern and contemporary art for museums across the country, including Between Here and Elsewhere: A Portrait of the New American Experience (2026), Amy Tan's Backyard Birds (2024), Hope is the Thing with Feathers: Contemporary Women Nature Artists (2023), and William Eggleston's Louisiana Project (2021). Her publications include “The First 50 Years: Celebrating a Half Century of Edinboro’s MFA Program” (2026), "Art that Matters to the Planet: The Beautiful and the Sublime" (2022), "A Museum Without Walls: Community Collaboration in Exhibition Development" (2019), and “Silent Resistance: The History and Resonance of 19th Century Photographs of Native Americans” (2016).
Prior to joining PennWest—Edinboro, Ferguson held positions as Curator of the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown, NY, where she developed and a new curatorial program and established an artist residency; Registrar of the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, TN; and positions with Davies Manor in Bartlett, TN and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA. She earned her MA in Art History and Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Memphis, and her BA in Art with an emphasis in photography from Penn State University. Throughout her career, a primary focus of her work has been on fostering collaborations with communities and organizations and creating transformational experiences for museum and gallery visitors.
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