Imagine the second floor of the University of Michigan Museum of Art. No matter which doors you enter through — the Alumni Memorial Hall doors, accessed through a classical colonnade, or the modern entries of the Maxine and Stuart Frankel and the Frankel Family Wing — and no matter which path you follow through the museum, at some point you find yourself on a threshold. You look through the glass out toward State Street and realize you’re on a bridge between the old and the new.

This transition is not subtle. Structurally, there’s a marked change in materials as the marble flooring turns to wood. The collections change as well — from exhibits featuring European and American art to those with Asian and African works. It can be described as a change in atmosphere. The old wing emotes rigidity and respect; the new oozes light and energy.

A man named Joseph Rosa stands on a similar threshold. As the new director of UMMA, Rosa is charged with a unique responsibility: bridging the gap between the museum’s 150-year-old collection and its brand new expansion, intended to usher UMMA into the 21st century. And with over 18,000 pieces in UMMA’s collection and 53,000 square feet in the new Frankel Wing, there are a lot of possible forms this bridge could take. But Rosa is up for the challenge.

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Rosa, soft spoken but energetic, describes his entry into the museum world as serendipitous. After receiving architecture degrees from both the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Columbia University, he worked for various architectural firms. Through that work, Rosa became interested in the work of Albert Frey, about whom he ultimately wrote a book and put together and curated a show.

Rosa says he didn’t plan to get into a career with museums, but since that first show, he has been hooked. His body of work speaks for itself. Rosa has curated more than 30 exhibits at the four museums he’s worked at: the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ruth Berson, the deputy director of exhibitions and collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art said Rosa was an “absolutely fabulous curator” when she worked with him during his time as the museum’s Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design.

She remembered, in particular, a series of exhibitions Rosa put together called “The Design Series” that looked at “cutting-edge work in architecture and design.”

“(The series) provided a forum for the ... emerging people in the field,” Berson said. “He has an eye for what is coming up and is new.”

Chrysanthe Broikos, a curator at the National Building Museum, echoes Berson’s sentiments on how Rosa nurtured and led his department in Washington.

“He brought a lot of great shows to the museum and really tried to raise the profile of the (National Building Museum),” Broikos said. “He would actually design a lot of the smaller shows we were doing ... and that helped in terms of the overall look and feel of the exhibition.”

But no museum tested Rosa more than the Art Institute of Chicago. In his position as the museum’s John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, Rosa was challenged with retooling his department as well as with overseeing a 300,000-square-foot expansion project.

Rosa was brought to Chicago to be, as he says, an “alchemist,” exponentially expanding the museum’s previously small collection in a short time span.

Zoë Ryan, the Art Institute’s Neville Bryan Curator of Design and interim John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, was actively involved with Rosa’s departmental changes.

Currently, Ryan and Rosa are co-curating an exhibit set to open at the Art Institute Dec. 11. It’s Rosa’s final exhibit at the Art Institute and is the result of Rosa’s and Ryan’s close collaboration for the past four years.