Robert Cozzolino is the Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia). He has been called the “curator of the dispossessed” for championing underrepresented artists and uncommon perspectives on well-known artists. He has collaborated with many contemporary artists, and in 2014 organized the largest American museum exhibition of David Lynch’s visual art. A native of Chicago, he studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago before receiving his MA and PhD (2006) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In his work on American art he has emphasized regional diversity, integrating artists of Illinois, Wisconsin, California, and other areas into installations, thematic exhibitions, and his scholarship. Before joining Mia he was the senior curator and Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Modern Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, where he oversaw more than 30 exhibitions, including retrospectives of George Tooker, Peter Blume, and Elizabeth Osborne. He acquired more than 2,000 objects for PAFA, mostly gifts, including the Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women and major collections of work by Sue Coe, Ellen Lanyon, and Miriam Schapiro.