BRUCE W. FERGUSON has recently become the new Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.  The School of Humanities and Social Sciences is the largest of the schools at AUC, housing the departments of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, English and Comparative Literature, History, Performing and Visual Arts, Philosophy, Political Science, Rhetoric and Composition, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, and Egyptology, as well as the Arabic Language and English Language Institutes.  

An art curator, critic and academic administrator for more than thirty years, Bruce has extensive management experience in both arts and academic organizations. 

Bruce led Future Arts Research (F.A.R.) at the University of Arizona as a groundbreaking institute within the President’s office and the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts.  In Phoenix, Ferguson was responsible for the formation of F.A.R. and together with his colleagues there has commissioned works of art like Anna Deveare Smith’s 2009 performances and Elizabeth Streb’s 2010 performances. As well, he has been responsible for bringing to the community and region numerous international artists, writers, architects and critics. He will continue to have an affiliation with Arizona State University, working on special projects and developing new partnerships with the American University in Cairo particularly in relation to a “desert initiative”.

Bruce previously served as the Dean, School of Arts at Columbia University; President and Executive Director of the New York Academy of Art; and is the founding Director and first biennial curator of SITE Santa Fe, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Bruce has curated more than 35 exhibitions for institutions such as the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Winnipeg and Vancouver Art Galleries in Canada and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He also organized exhibitions within the international biennales of Sao Paulo, Sydney, Venice and Istanbul. He recognized as having identified many of the top contemporary artists in early stages of their careers.

A prolific writer, Bruce has written for art publications like Canadian Art, Art Forum, Art in America, Art + Text, Flash Art, Bomb Magazine, Art Press, Borders Crossing, and Parachute. He was the curator and co-writer for Table at the Imperial, a 60 minute radio play for the CBC Radio Drama Series Playing for Keeps #7 and was awarded a Senior Canada Council Grant in Criticism for writing.  Along with Reesa Greenberg and Sandy Nairne, he received a Getty Senior Research Fellowship grant which resulted in the publication of a seminal anthology of essays on the theories of exhibitions, titled Thinking About Exhibitions (Routledge: 1996).

As a curator, Bruce is interested in audiences: "There has been a whole shift in the museum world, and in the university, from the idea of supply-driven toward demand-driven programming," he says. "It used to be that curators just made exhibitions that reflected their interests. But now, increasingly, you have to ask – does anybody want it or need it? There has to be some relationship to the community and to the local."

Bruce received his B.A. in Art History from the University of Saskatchewan and his M.A. in Communication from McGill University in Montreal. He has an honorary doctorate from the Kansas City Art Institute.

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