Linda Dorman (she/her) is an Indiana-based curator, photographer, writer, and visual arts advocate.
Dorman received a BA in photography from Columbia College in Chicago and worked as a photographer and photo researcher at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (1990 – 95). She served as Director of Exhibitions and Artists Services at South Shore Arts, formerly Northern Indiana Arts Association, in Munster, IN, (1995 – 2000), where she curated and organized over 70 exhibitions and programs.
Exhibition highlights include Jumpin’ Backflash: Original Imagist Artwork, 1966 – 1969, which traveled to the Chicago Cultural Center, and The Mystical Arts of Tibet, which brought Tibetan art, artifacts, and monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery in Atlanta, GA, to create a sand mandala in Northwest Indiana for the first time.
Dorman served as the lead curator of exhibitions for the year-long Chicago in the Year 2000 (CITY 2000), sponsored by the Comer Foundation, for which 200 photographers made half a million photographs documenting life in Chicago. That year, Dorman organized over twenty exhibitions around the city.
Dorman and her partner Tom Torluemke brought numerous inaugural arts and culture projects to downtown Hammond Indiana, a Rust Belt city devastated by the impact of the hard-hit steel industry. Between 2001 and 2003 Dorman and Torluemke were the creative directors of Arts Inside Out, an interdisciplinary arts festival in Hammond that featured over 300 visual artists, dancers, musicians, writers, and actors annually. In 2002, they founded Uncle Freddy’s Gallery. Between 2002 and 2009, they hosted seventy exhibitions of contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists from the Midwest and around the world. The gallery’s programming also included the artwork of local artists who were formerly incarcerated and those with mental illness and autism spectrum disorders.
Dorman and Torluemke curated exhibitions at Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 2008 and 2012; the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University in 2011; the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago in 2017; and visual arts programming around Chicago under the name ORBIT.
In 2008, Dorman renewed her interest in photography when she started photographing her life with Torluemke and her son after they established Torluemke’s studio in their home, where Dorman is the project and studio manager.
