PJ Gubatina Policarpio is a cultural leader and creative collaborator — curator, educator, programmer and community organizer — with over 10 years of experience in curatorial practice, museum education, public programming and art administration. He has led innovative, rigorous, and socially engaged initiatives alongside artists, writers, scholars, and communities of all kinds. PJ has worked at the Queens Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, where he was a Fellow in Museum Education. As the inaugural manager of youth development at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, PJ developed and led a portfolio of transformative mission-driven programming and partnerships. He is currently Curator at Root Division, a non-profit visual arts space in downtown San Francisco.
PJ has organized exhibitions and programming internationally, such as Notes for Tomorrow (Independent Curators International, 2021-Present), Trina Michelle Robinson: Open Your Eyes to Water (500 Capp Street and Root Division, 2026), to see what isn’t hard to see (Headlands Center for the Arts, 2025), Ceremonies: Rituals to Self (San Francisco Arts Commission, 2025), Cian Dayrit: Liberties Were Taken (Root Division, 2025), , Letter from the Network (Berkeley Art Center, 2024), Notes on Cultural Evidence (slash, 2023), Conversations on Carlos Villa: World-Making and Cross-Cultural Solidarity (Asian Art Museum, 2022), Tarsal by Metatarsal (Headlands Center for the Arts, 2021), Solidarity Struggle Victory (Southern Exposure, 2019), Rally: Queer Art and Activism Now (Dixon Place, 2017).
He has juried for awards and fellowships including Artadia, Headlands Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Fellowship, and the Rainin Foundation’s Art Fellowships, and has presented lectures and keynotes at Portland State University’s School of Art and Design, California College of the Arts, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, University of California at Berkeley, The New School, School of the Art Institute Chicago, among others. PJ is co-founder of Pilipinx American Library, an itinerant library and programming platform dedicated to diasporic Filipinx perspectives. His publications are in the collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Born in the Philippines, PJ immigrated to the United States in his early teens. He lives and works between San Francisco and New York City, the Ramaytush Ohlone and Lenape homelands.