PJ Gubatina Policarpio is a curator, educator, and cultural leader whose primary research and practice explore how art can reshape historical understanding and deepen our capacity to live together. Through exhibitions, publications, and public programs, he collaborates with artists, writers, scholars, and communities to surface overlooked histories and build new forms of solidarity.
Working across museums, artist-centered organizations, and independent initiatives, PJ approaches curatorial practice as an act of collaborative world-making. His projects move fluidly between contemporary art, education, publishing, and civic engagement, asking how artistic practice generates new knowledge and expands the social role of art and cultural institutions.
PJ is Curator at Root Division in San Francisco, where he leads the organization's exhibition program, including acclaimed exhibitions Trina Michelle Robinson: Open Your Eyes to Water (in collaboration with 500 Capp Street, 2026) and Cian Dayrit: Liberties Were Taken (2025). He previously held positions 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, he built an institution-wide portfolio of youth programs and strategic partnerships that reimagined how museums engage young people as artists, collaborators, and cultural leaders.
Additional curatorial projects include Notes for Tomorrow (Independent Curators International, 2021–present), Magical / Realism (San Francisco Art Fair, 2025), to see what isn't hard to see (Headlands Center for the Arts, 2025), Ceremonies: Rituals to Self (San Francisco Arts Commission, 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), and Rally: Queer Art and Activism Now (Dixon Place, 2017).
In 2014, PJ co-founded Pilipinx American Library, an itinerant library and public programming platform dedicated to diasporic Filipinx perspectives. He has served as a juror for Artadia, the Headlands Center for the Arts Bay Area Fellowship, and the Rainin Foundation Artist Fellowships, and has lectured at California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, Portland State University's School of Art and Design, The New School, Maryland Institute College of Art, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His publications are held in the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Born in the Philippines, Policarpio immigrated to the United States in his early teens. He lives and works between San Francisco and New York City.