Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
Olivia Miller will take the reins at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Sept. 15. She currently runs the University of Arizona Museum of Art, but she earned a master's degree from UO.
After a national search, the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art has found its new executive director: an Arizona arts administrator who once helped restore a stolen, priceless painting.
Olivia Miller, the director of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, has been named the new head of the Jordan Schnitzer museum. She will start Sept. 15, taking over for John Weber, who has held the job since 2019.
Miller has held leadership roles at the University of Arizona museum since 2014, including stints as the museum’s curator of exhibitions and curator of education.
The most dramatic highlight of her time in Arizona involved a stolen painting, “Woman-Ochre” by Willem de Kooning, which was stolen from the museum in 1985. The painting resurfaced in 2022, when the museum got a call from an antiques store owner who bought a collection of items from a New Mexico estate sale and discovered the stolen painting.
“My co-worker and I just stopped our conversation and looked at each other,” Miller told CNBC in 2022. “She said, ‘Are we going to remember this moment for the rest of our lives?’”
The painting was returned to the museum, but in poor condition. Miller was able to get the Getty Conservation Institute to repair the canvas before it returned to the museum’s walls.
At the Arizona museum, which has a $1.2 million budget and a staff of 11, she cared for a permanent collection of more than 7,000 works.
At the Schnitzer, Miller will now lead a museum with a $4.5 million budget and a permanent collection of more than 18,000 works. Though it’s a bigger museum, it’s not an unfamiliar one to her. During her time in Arizona, the museum hosted two exhibitions featuring art from Jordan Schnitzer’s family foundation.
The announcement came in a joint email statement from UO administrators Christopher P. Long, provost and senior vice president, and Kate Morris, executive vice provost for academic affairs.
“And while she has roots in Arizona — she received her bachelor’s degree at UA — Olivia is also a Duck,” the statement reads, noting that she earned her master’s degree in art history at UO and worked as a collections intern at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
