BMA Announces Leslie Cozzi Promoted to Department Head for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

Olivia Dill is named Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs and Robin Owen Joyce is named the museum’s first Assistant Curator of Academic Engagement

BALTIMORE, MD (August 19, 2025)—The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) today announced appointments for several key positions in its Department of Prints Drawings, and Photographs, considered one of the finest collections of graphic arts in the U.S. with more than 68,000 works. BMA Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Leslie Cozzi was promoted to Department Head, while Olivia Dill was recently appointed as the department’s new Assistant Curator. Additionally, Robin Owen Joyce was promoted to the first Assistant Curator of Academic Engagement, a new position that works with all curatorial departments and especially the Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings and Photographs and the Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies.

Leslie Cozzi joined the BMA in 2018 as Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and swiftly made vital contributions to the museum’s artistic program by curating or co-curating seven exhibitions in four years, including Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex: Photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick; Zackary Drucker: Icons; A Modern Influence: Henri Matisse, Etta Cone, and Baltimore (with Katy Rothkopf); Valerie Maynard: Lost and Found (with Asma Naeem); and SHAN Wallace: 410 (with Cecilia Wichmann). She was named Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs in 2022, and that year she co-curated Darrel Ellis: Regeneration, a critically acclaimed traveling exhibition that is distinguished as the first comprehensive museum presentation of the artist’s work. Cozzi also curated Omar Ba: Political Animals, the first solo U.S. museum exhibition of the Senegalese-born artist; and more recently, Matsumi Kanemitsu: Figure and Fantasy, focusing on the early work of an Abstract Expressionist who spent part of his career in Baltimore.

Cozzi’s commitment to works on paper has resulted in the addition of 392 new works into the museum’s collection, dating from c. 1641 to the present. In addition to her curatorial work, she helped establish several important partnerships by serving on a taskforce to strengthen collaborations with the Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and helping to create the Valerie J. Maynard Internship at the BMA.

“As her impressive record shows, Leslie is a curator who brings extraordinary dedication to the BMA’s principles of artistic excellence, local and global relevance, and engaged community partnerships,” said Kevin Tervala, BMA Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator. “Asma Naeem, the BMA’s director, and I could not be more excited to see what she will accomplish in her new leadership role.”

As the BMA’s first Assistant Curator of Academic Engagement, Robin Owen Joyce fosters closer relationships with the area’s colleges and universities through scholarly collaborations that center the museum’s collections and exhibitions. In his previous position as the BMA Getty Paper Project Fellow in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs (2022–2024), Joyce co-curated the exhibition Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA (with Virginia Anderson). His forthcoming curatorial project, Deconstructing Nature: Environmental Transformation in the Lucas Collection, explores artistic engagement with the environment within the BMA’s celebrated collection of 19th-century prints and drawings.

Olivia Dill will join the BMA in October after serving as the Moore Curatorial Fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum, where she curated two forthcoming exhibitions and surveyed the collection’s natural history drawings. This culminated in a graduate seminar: Drawing Nature, 1500-1900, which she co-organized (with Sarah Mallory and Roberta Olson). She has also held one- and two-year fellowships in works on paper and conservation departments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Dill recently won the 2025 Ricciardi Prize from the peer-reviewed journal Master Drawings for the best new article on a drawings topic by a scholar under the age of 40.

Leslie Cozzi

Robin Owen Joyce

Olivia Dill

About the Baltimore Museum of Art

Founded in 1914, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) inspires people of all ages and backgrounds through exhibitions, programs, and collections that tell an expansive story of art—challenging long-held narratives and embracing new voices. Our outstanding collection of more than 97,000 objects spans many eras and cultures and includes the world’s largest public holding of works by Henri Matisse; one of the nation’s finest collections of prints, drawings, and photographs; and a rapidly growing number of works by contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds. The museum is also distinguished by a neoclassical building designed by American architect John Russell Pope and two beautifully landscaped gardens featuring an array of modern and contemporary sculpture. The BMA is located three miles north of the Inner Harbor, adjacent to the main campus of Johns Hopkins University, and has a community branch at Lexington Market. General admission is free so that everyone can enjoy the power of art.