Sarah Fillmore is Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Programs of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Having joined the Gallery in 2005, Fillmore oversees the provincial art collection as well as the Gallery’s acquisition, interpretation, education, conservation and exhibition programs.
Fillmore is a champion of emerging Canadian artists, with an interest in Atlantic Canadian art within national and international contexts. She has curated over 40 group and solo exhibitions, including the retrospective exhibition of Canadian abstract painter, Jacques Hurtubise; Lisa Lipton: STOP@forever; Skin: the Seduction of Surface; Forces of Nature; The Last Frontier, and, from 2002 to 2015, the annual Sobey Art Award. She co-curated Hanson and Sonnenberg: The Way Things Are with David Diviney (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia); Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel with Melissa Bennett (Art Gallery of Hamilton); and the touring retrospective and accompanying publication of Canadian realist painter Mary Pratt, with Mireille Eagan and Caroline Stone (The Rooms, Newfoundland). Recent projects include a retrospective of Canadian painter Marion Wagschal, presented at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, as well as a solo exhibition of Halifax-based painter Emily Falencki and I will Meet you in the Sun, Montreal-based printmaker Mitch Mitchell’s large-scale print installation. She most recently co-curated a major retrospective of photographer Thaddeus Holownia’s work titled The Nature of Nature.

From 2007 to 2015, Fillmore was chair of the jury and curator of the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s premier contemporary art award for an artist 40 or under. She is author of numerous catalogue and journal essays and has lectured across the country, and internationally.