Gabrielle Robinson-Tillenburg

Gabrielle (Gabi) Tillenburg (she/her) is a PhD student studying modern and contemporary Caribbean and diasporic art at the University of Maryland under the advisement of Dr. Abigail McEwen. She is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Digital Studies in the Arts in Humanities. Her interests include contemporary Puerto Rican art, artist activism in anti-imperial movements, and interpretations of time and memory in lens-based art. In 2023, she was awarded the Summer Internship Fellowship by UMD to pursue work at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico where she conducted curatorial research in El Centro de Documentación. In 2022, she was the Bresler Curator in Resident at VisArts. At the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, she was the Catto Curatorial Intern for Time Based Media Art and Latino Art & History in the summer of 2021 and the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Intern in the fall of 2021. From 2015-2020 she served as the Exhibitions Coordinator at Strathmore. Her curatorial projects have included Sound of Fire (VisArts), RINGGOLD | SAAR: Meeting on the Matrix (co-curator, David C. Driskell Center), Re∙cast: 22 Sculptural works from the Art Museum of Americas Collection (co-curator, UMD Gallery), Past Process (Strathmore), and Soft Serve (Willow Street Gallery), among others. Her work has been published in Artlines and Sequitur journals. She holds an MA in Art History and Archaeology from UMD and a BFA in Film from the University of Central Florida. Her MA thesis, Picturing Liminality: Island Bodies of Okinawa and Puerto Rico, examines three video-based artworks commenting on US naval occupation. Her research continues to build on this comparative study as she works toward her dissertation.