Julie Poitras Santos’ crossdisciplinary practice connects ecological thinking and earth science disciplines with immersive experience and community engagement. Poitras Santos’ solo and collaborative work has been exhibited in the Portland Museum of Art, ME; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), Sweden; Queens Museum, NY; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Karlskrona Konsthall, Sweden; Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain; Reykjanesbaer Art Museum, Iceland; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, among others; and at International Walking Art conferences in Girona, Spain (2024), Prespes, Greece (2019) and Le Romieu, France (2017).
Poitras Santos’ writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Leonardo: MIT Press, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Chart, The Café Review, Living Maps Review, and numerous curatorial publications. Her curatorial projects include co-curating with Catherine Besteman Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways (2018) for the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has also been supported by Kindling Fund, Onion Foundation, Collective Futures Fund, and Maine Arts Commission. Other recent projects include, Platform Projects/Walks 2020: ecologies of the local, bringing artists and scientists together for conversations about climate change; Liveable Worlds (2023) co-curated with Sabine Malcolm, focusing on how artists have seen environmental disruption as a moment to reimagine and rebuild; and SOIL CULTURE (2024) with Maria Patricia Tinajero, fostering embodied understandings of the environmental and social impacts of soil.
Poitras Santos served as Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D from 2019-2023. She has taught visual art since 1995, serving as a professor of Studio Art in the MFA program at Maine College of Art & Design since 2010.