(You know—the third-person version)

Jessica Skwire Routhier is an editor, writer, and art historian in Maine with more than twenty-five years of experience, including a fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; nearly twelve years in the curatorial department of the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and four years as the Director of the Saco Museum in Saco, Maine. She has worked on many projects and publications—as both an author and an editor—that celebrate the intersection of art and ideas.

Jessica is the managing editor of Panorama, the born-digital, open-access academic journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and is a freelance copy editor, specializing in art history, for several museums and academic presses. She is also a contributing writer for Antiques and the Arts Weekly, producing cover stories on major museum exhibitions nationwide.

Jessica’s specialized area of scholarship is nineteenth-century American landscape painting, which she has been writing, researching, and lecturing about since 1997. She is the lead author of a monograph about the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress, an 800-foot-long painting in the collections of the Saco Museum. She has also curated exhibitions and authored publications on Maine painters Charles Codman and Harrison Bird Brown, among others. She recently uncovered new biographical information about the Hudson River School painter Jesse Talbot, a friend of the young Walt Whitman, which was published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Intersections between art and literature are also a focus of her current research project, looking at art and art history in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.

Jessica has served as President of Maine Archives and Museums and founding Chair of South Portland’s Arts and Historic Preservation Committee. She has also served on collections and advisory committees of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Victoria Mansion, Maine’s Cultural Emergency Resource Coalition, and Northeast Document Conservation Center. In 2015, she was the Coordinator of the Maine Photo Project, a statewide collaboration of arts and cultural organizations. She has also served as a grant reviewer for the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and the Maine Arts Commission and as a juror for many local art shows.

Jessica graduated with honors from Bowdoin College with a major in art history and a minor in studio art. She earned her M.A. in art history, with a certificate in museum studies, from Tufts University. She also continued her education through attending Winterthur’s Fall Institute (on a full scholarship) and completing two courses as a “special” (non-degree) student through the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine.

Jessica is married to Portland Press Herald staff writer Ray Routhier. They live near the ocean with their two amazing kids.

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