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Erika Holum
Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator, Blaffer Art Museum
Instructor, Arts Leadership Program

Erika Mei Chua Holum is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art
Museum at the University of Houston. Recent projects at the Blaffer Art Museum include the
2024 Texas Biennial: The Last Sky (2024-25) Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions with
KADIST San Francisco (2024-2025), and solo exhibitions with Reynier Leyva Novo (2024), Cian
Dayrit (2024), and Ja'Tovia Gary (2025). She organizes Ecofictions and Understories (2023-24),
a city-responsive curatorial program to speculate potential worlds for gathering, resisting, and
regeneration in artistic practices in conjunction with the exhibition Climate Migration with the
Houston Climate Museum supported by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. With
support from the Idea Fund, Erika launched the Sahara Dust Residency in 2024, a summer
residency program activated by forms of knowledge-sharing across the temporary and migratory
region created by Saharan dust clouds. They have contributed to projects and exhibitions
globally, such as Majority Rule: Myth-making and survival strategies from AAPI artists at
Sanman Studios (2023), makibaka! Fifty Years of Filipino-American Youth Activism at Alief Art
House (2021), Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
(2020), the Second Edition of the Lagos Biennial in Nigeria (2019), and Obscura Festival of
Photography in Malaysia (2018). Erika holds an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies from the
University of Illinois Chicago, a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and is completing a PhD in Art History at Rice University.