Heather Sealy Lineberry is Senior Curator/Associate Director at the ASU Art Museum and curates contemporary art exhibitions with an emphasis on new art forms, collaborations across disciplines and experimental curatorial approaches. Lineberry has curated exhibitions exploring a broad range of art forms including New American City: Artists Look Forward, Art on the Edge of Fashion (traveled nationally), Jim Campbell – Transforming Time – Electronic Works, Sites Around the City: Art and Environment (a citywide series of exhibitions and programs), The Long Day: Sculpture by Claudette Schreuders (traveled nationally), Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, Installation by Brent Green (US Premiere) and Miracle Report: Julianne Swartz and Ken Landauer (a Social Studies project). In 2007, the New American City project, which she co-curated with John Spiak, received the President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness at ASU. Lineberry’s exhibitions and accompanying catalogs have traveled to museums across the U.S., including Business As Usual/New Video from China/Cao Fei and Yang Fudong (co-curated with Marilyn Zeitlin), Intertwined: Contemporary Baskets from the Sara and David Lieberman Collection, and Crafting a Continuum: Rethinking Contemporary Craft (co-curated with Peter Held and Elizabeth Kozlowski).
Lineberry is a Senior Sustainability Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. Beginning in 2000, a focus of her research and curatorial work has been artists who explore the interconnected natural, built, social and political environment and employ strategies from visualization to engagement to shift our understanding and behavior. Lineberry organized Defining Sustainability (fall 2009), a series of exhibitions and projects in a variety of media and practices that came together to define sustainability. The goal was to outline the complex ideas for a broad audience through work by artists and designers, and generate ongoing, interdisciplinary conversations on the challenges. Recent projects include Cu29: Mining for You, 2013, a collaborative exhibition by artists Matthew Moore (Phoenix) and Clare Patey (London) centered on the issue of the depletion of our natural resources, specifically copper. Lineberry and the artists collaborated with students and faculty from the School of Art, GIOS, and the School of Earth and Space Exploration. The project culminated in the Feast on the Street, an urban harvest festival produced by ASU and community groups and drawing 9,000 people for a shared meal, art and sustainability experiences and performances in the middle of Phoenix.
In addition to curating exhibitions, Lineberry manages the curatorial department at the ASU Art Museum and oversees historic and contemporary collections. Lineberry publishes, teaches and lectures to university and community groups on contemporary art, museum studies and curatorial practice. She serves on honors and masters committees, and mentors interns including the Windgate Curatorial Interns. She is on the board for the Southwest Center for Archaeology and Society in the ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change as well as other initiatives and committees across campus and disciplines.
She holds an M.A. in art history and a B.A. in the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin.