Selma Holo

Selma Holo is the Executive Director of USC Museums (University of Southern California). At present that includes the USC Fisher Museum of Art, the USC Pacific Asia Museum, and the Hancock Memorial Museum. She is also Full Professor of Art History and Director of the International Museum Institute at USC. Holo’s first two books were on the relationship of art museums to evolving democracies in Spain and Mexico. They are Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain and Oaxaca at the Crossroads: Managing Memory, Negotiating Change, both published by the Smithsonian Press and both translated into Spanish. Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values and Re-Mix: Changing Conversations in Museums of the Americas, with the assistance of Mari-Tere Alvarez, argue respectively for establishing a set of qualitative values when assessing museums’ success over the tyranny of “the gate”, and a life-cycle theory for museums that allows for analysis of our museums through a panarchic lens. Both of the latest books have become important handbooks for strategic planning in museums across the spectrum of types of museums.

Holo’s Museums Studies Program at USC was a graduate program granting a double Masters in Art History and Museum Studies, with a critical mass of her graduates going on for doctorates. Her success in placing these graduates was noteworthy with almost 100% of them going into museums or related institutions such as foundations, auction houses, or university posts.

The USC Fisher Museum which Holo has directed since 1981 has a 3000-piece collection and has concentrated in the last 25 years on exhibitions from Latin America, Spain, as well as on Chicano and Mexican-American Art. The USC Pacific Asia Museum, which she has only recently taken on, will be a counterpart to Fisher by its concentration on Asia and the Pacific Rim.

Holo earned her Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara, her MA at Hunter College, CUNY, and her BA at Northwestern University.