Dan Mills is Director of the Bates College Museum of Art and Lecturer in the Humanities. He is known as an artist/director who leads an adventuresome curatorial program that has investigated a wide variety of themes through group exhibitions and explored the oeuvre of numerous artists in solo exhibitions. Mills’ curatorial projects have been presented at over three dozen institutions in cities including Beijing, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, and at academic and municipal museums throughout the US. During his tenure at three academic institutions, Mills has elevated the profile of exhibitions, grown and developed the staff, resources, collections, and the integration of programs into the academic, cultural, and social life of campus and surrounding communities.
Selected themes Mills’ curatorial projects have addressed include visual story telling by international artists, performance in contemporary Chinese photography, photographs of Marsden Hartley, artists who address epic subjects in large scale paintings, American identity artists, contemporary Australian aboriginal art, Mesoamerican masks, and artists and their collections and source materials. Mills has curated exhibitions of a long list of artists from unknown and emerging to some of the most noted of our time. He has also partnered with artists and scholars on large projects in order to investigate and present a wider range of topics, including contemporary Saudi Arabian art, American ceramics, Shaman art of Vietnam and southern China, New York abstraction, and contemporary Chinese art. For more: Bates Museum of Art.
Mills maintains an active studio practice and exhibits extensively. For more: www.dan-mills.net.