Born 1952 in Elmhurst, Illinois, Bruce Pepich is the director and curator of collections at the Racine Art Museum in Racine, Wisconsin. Pepich earned a BA in art history from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, in 1974. Later that year, he was hired as a project manager at the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, and became its director in 1980. Since then, Pepich has grown the museum into a two-site institution, raising more than $10 million in a capital campaign to open the Racine Art Museum (RAM), an off-shoot of Wustum, with an award-winning new building in downtown Racine. In addition to organizing groundbreaking exhibitions and publications, under his leadership RAM, has expanded its craft collection to be one of the largest in the country that includes seminal works like Toshiko Takaezu’s Star Series. Pepich has received the Ann Koski Professional Excellence Award from the Wisconsin Federation of Museums (2010), the Governor’s Award in Support of the Arts from the Wisconsin Foundation for the Arts and Governor Jim Doyle (2010), and the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award from the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Wisconsin Visual Arts, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters (2011). Bruce Pepich was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Craft Council in 2012.