Roya Amirsoleymani is Artistic Director & Curator of Public Engagement at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), a multidisciplinary center for contemporary and experimental art, where she co-curates the annual Time-Based Art Festival (TBA); year-round exhibitions, performances, and socially engaged projects; and critical, contextual, educational, community-based, and participatory programs. With PICA, she has designed and helps manage the Creative Exchange Lab artist residency program, the Crucial Bonding program for youth and artist mentors of color, and the Precipice Fund, a grantmaking program through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting Program. She is PICA’s primary liaison to the Black Art Ecology of Portland project and is part of a PICA team supporting the development of the international Global First Nations Performance Network. In her work with PICA and beyond, she strives to foreground complex questions and concerns of access, equity, and inclusion for experimental art and its institutions.

Roya is a founding member of Arts Workers for Equity (AWE), which seeks to advance racial equity in Portland’s cultural sector, and is on faculty in the Art & Social Practice MFA Program at Portland State University. She has presented at international, national, and local conferences and convenings and has served on numerous national and regional grant panels and award committees. She holds a BA in Contemporary Visual Culture & Gender Studies (Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, California) and a Masters’ in Arts Management (University of Oregon).