Observer’s Curators to Watch in 2026

As the word itself suggests, the role of the curator begins with “taking care.” Curators act as intermediaries between artists, institutions or galleries and audiences, but also as mediators within the broader network of stakeholders who provide the funding, visibility and infrastructure that enable cultural value to circulate. As the art world’s systems have grown more complex and globally interconnected, curators now play a role that extends far beyond selecting artworks, determining display strategies or writing exhibition texts.

They are central pillars in the dynamics of value creation—shaping narratives and visibility, advocating for artists and securing the resources and conditions needed to realize their visions. Their power no longer lies in interpretation, tastemaking or storytelling alone, but in their capacity to build cultural ecosystems: patron networks, artist pipelines, intellectual frameworks and cross-border collaborations.

By building and reshaping institutions, rewriting art-historical canons, commissioning new work and fostering opportunities for exchange, the following curators function as dynamic catalysts transforming the contemporary art system as a whole. Responding to the political, ecological and technological forces that define our time, they play a vital role in supporting—and quite literally “taking care” of—the circulation and production of artistic vision across the art world’s many tiers, contexts and voices.

Hoor Al Qasimi

• President and director | Sharjah Art Foundation

Hoor Al Qasimi has transformed the Gulf’s cultural landscape into one of the world’s most closely watched centers of contemporary art, while continually reshaping what biennials can be. Since co-curating the Sharjah Biennial in 2003 at just twenty-two, she has expanded its reach into a year-round infrastructure of residencies, commissions and educational initiatives, positioning Sharjah as a nexus for artists between East and West. Her curatorial approach foregrounds ecological, postcolonial and transregional perspectives that link Asia, Africa and the Middle East in critical dialogue. In 2025, she was appointed artistic director of both the Aichi Triennale and next year’s Biennale of Sydney, cementing her reputation as one of the most influential figures redefining the role and format of biennials in response to shifting cultural contexts. “A biennial has to engage with the city. It can’t be isolated,” she said in a discussion with Observer about the Aichi Triennale. “Some biennials are reduced to museum shows, but for me, the exciting ones are the ones that venture into public spaces, engage with people and develop as collaborative processes.” Most recently, ALESCO named Al Qasimi its 2025–26 Ambassador Extraordinary for Arab Culture, and she was appointed president of the newly established University of the Arts Sharjah, launched in December 2025.

Alex Gartenfeld

• Founding deputy director and chief curator | ICA Miami

Alex Gartenfeld has transformed ICA Miami into one of the U.S.’s most dynamic museums, particularly noted for its collection and contemporary programming. At only 37, he has overseen landmark acquisitions, groundbreaking commissions and now a major expansion through the planned acquisition of the neighboring de la Cruz Collection building, which will double ICA Miami’s exhibition space. His curatorial philosophy pairs experimentation with intellectual rigor—seen in shows like last year’s Keiichi Tanaami retrospective and his embrace of digital art—reflecting Miami’s dual identity as a regional city and global crossroads. “Over the last decade, we have been among the world’s most actively growing institutions for contemporary art,” he told Observer ahead of last year’s Miami Art Week. “Our collecting approach is global and interdisciplinary and includes various perspectives and narratives. Whenever we present works from the collection, we approach these presentations as scholarly curated exhibitions that highlight topical themes and histories and often bring new voices to the fore.” Gartenfeld’s leadership has helped define a new institutional model—nimble, patron-supported and conceptually ambitious—that positions ICA Miami as both an incubator for emerging voices and a significant force in next-generation museum practice.

Naomi Beckwith

• Deputy director and chief curator | The Guggenheim

Naomi Beckwith, newly appointed artistic director of documenta 16, is one of the most visible curatorial leaders redefining major institutions from within. Trained at Northwestern University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she built her career at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she elevated discourse on race, feminism and conceptual art through exhibitions featuring Adrian Piper, Howardena Pindell and Lynette Yiadom‑Boakye as well as groundbreaking thematic shows like “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum and ”ECHO DELAY REVERB – American Art, French Thought,” which is currently on view at Palais Tokyo in Paris, through February 2026. Her move to the Guggenheim in 2021 marked a generational pivot toward inclusivity and intellectual depth at the top of American museum culture. Her appointment to lead documenta 16 was a welcome surprise. She is the first Black woman to curate the show in its 69-year history and only the second woman overall, after Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev curated the 2012 edition, and she has assembled an all-women curatorial team. Beckwith is notably one of the first artistic directors of documenta without significant biennial experience. She served on the curatorial committee for one edition of SITE Santa Fe’s SITElines biennial and the awards jury for the 2015 Venice Biennale, but her long career staging major museum exhibitions and her standing as a global cultural force shaping new institutional narratives was qualification enough.

Thelma Golden

• Director and chief curator | The Studio Museum in Harlem

Thelma Golden has spent three decades defining the contours of Black art within contemporary American discourse. As director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem since 2005, she has mentored generations of artists—among them Kehinde Wiley, Jordan Casteel and Mickalene Thomas—and established the museum as an incubator of talent and thought. Her curatorial landmark “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art” (Whitney Museum, 1994-95) remains a touchstone in art history, as does her concept of “post-Blackness,” which expanded understandings of identity beyond essentialist frameworks. Now overseeing the Studio Museum’s reopening in its new David Adjaye-designed building, Golden continues to shape how American institutions narrate race, community and culture in the 21st Century, as well as how they serve their communities. ​​“We felt it essential that there were areas throughout the museum that could be used for communal gathering,” Golden told Observer, noting that the newly introduced Stoop (descending steps that double as seating) was intentionally designed as a public space—an extension of the museum into the neighborhood, where the community can gather for lectures, performances and films.

Tyler Blackwell

• Curator of contemporary art | Speed Art Museum

Tyler Blackwell represents a new generation of curators revitalizing regional institutions through patron engagement and top-quality acquisitions. His work focuses on expanding the museum’s holdings of living artists and building a collection that speaks to today’s social and cultural dynamics. In just three years under his curation the museum was able to acquire over 50 works by leading names of our times, including Igshaan Adams, Rita Ackermann, Anthony Akinbola, Teresa Baker, Hernan Bas, María Berrío, Jordan Ann Craig, Tony Cokes, Anthony Cudahy, vanessa german, Hugh Hayden, Oliver Herring, Esteban Jefferson, Young Joon Kwak, Simone Leigh, Leslie Martinez, Danielle Mckinney, Rebecca Morris, Angel Otero, Naudline Pierre, Ebony G. Patterson, Christina Quarles, Celeste Rapone, Jacolby Satterwhite, Kathia St. Hilaire, Chiffon Thomas, Salman Toor, Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Jimmy Wright—artists whose practices span abstraction and figuration, identity and material experimentation and whose inclusion underscores Blackwell’s commitment to an inclusive, forward-looking curatorial vision. Through acquisitions and exhibitions that connect local narratives to national conversations on equity, ecology and materiality, Blackwell has elevated the Speed’s profile beyond its locality to a truly global perspective. His approach underscores a broader shift in U.S. museum culture—one in which regional institutions reclaim contemporary relevance through thoughtful collection-building and attention to the most pressing matters of our time.

Carla Acevedo-Yates

• Independent curator

Carla Acevedo-Yates, the Puerto Rican curator, researcher and critic recently tapped for Naomi Beckwith’s documenta team, has established herself as a vital force in fostering dialogue between the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. After holding curatorial positions at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum, Acevedo-Yates joined the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019, where she curated groundbreaking group exhibitions on Latino and Caribbean diasporic exchanges and identities, including “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s–Today” and “entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico.” Her curatorial practice today explores how colonial legacies, global capitalism and migratory experiences shape contemporary aesthetics, often situating local Caribbean narratives within global frameworks. By connecting rigorous research with poetic curatorial storytelling, Acevedo-Yates has become a leading advocate for artists working across geographies and histories, prompting institutions to adopt a hemispheric understanding of the Americas and their interconnected cultural landscape.

Xiaoyu Weng

• Director | The Tanoto Art Foundation

Xiaoyu Weng has built an exceptional international career bridging North America and Asia. While excelling in her role at Tanoto Art Foundation in Singapore, Weng was appointed director of New York’s experimental Art in General before being named one of the curators for documenta 16. A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and California College of the Arts, she previously led the modern and contemporary art department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curated the inaugural Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg and worked at the Guggenheim Museum as Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art, where she created an online series examining anti-Asian racism through contemporary art that gained wide attention during the pandemic. Earlier in her career, in 2010, she was the founding director of Asia Programs in Paris and San Francisco for the Kadist Art Foundation. Weng’s exhibitions often address the entanglements of ecology, technology and feminism within globalization, positioning her as one of the most incisive voices exploring how decolonial and environmental thought inform artistic practice. Her simultaneous leadership roles exemplify the agility of a new generation of cross-border curators redefining institutional models on a global scale.

Marcela Guerrero

• Curator of the 2026 Whitney Biennial

Marcela Guerrero brings a transnational sensibility and deep expertise in Latinx and Caribbean art to one of the world’s most closely watched exhibitions. As the Whitney Museum’s former associate curator, she helped reshape acquisitions and programming to reflect the multiplicity of American identities, championing artists long excluded from mainstream narratives. She has also curated landmark exhibitions that foreground Latinx and Caribbean artists. Most notably, in 2022, she organized the critically acclaimed “No existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” a powerful exhibition that examined the profound social and political consequences of the hurricane and how Puerto Rican contemporary artists confronted, processed and reimagined its aftermath. Additionally, Guerrero co-curated the solo exhibition of paintings by Colombian-born Ilana Savdie in 2023 and was part of the curatorial team that organized a critical survey on the relations between Mexican muralists and American art: “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945.” Her upcoming biennial, which she’ll co-curate with Drew Sawyer (the institution’s Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography), is expected to expand that vision, foregrounding how migration, hybridity and language define the contemporary American condition.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

• Director | Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)

Cameroonian curator, theorist and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung has emerged as one of the most forward-thinking curators today. As director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, he has transformed the institution into a laboratory for decolonial and global thinking, connecting art, science and sound into fluid intellectual ecosystems. His appointment as curator of the 2025 São Paulo Biennial—where he led a conceptual team that included Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, Keyna Eleison and Henriette Gallus—extended this approach, reimagining exhibition-making as a space of epistemic repair, solidarity and collective healing. Before stepping into his current role, Soh Bejeng Ndikung founded SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, an independent space and discursive platform that bridges art-world geographies and epistemologies. In 2017, he served as curator-at-large for the ambitious and memorable documenta 14 with an extensive program between Athens and Kassel. Ndikung’s transdisciplinary practice embodies a new curatorial paradigm—one that sees art as a vehicle for ecological awareness, historical redress and imagination beyond Western perspectives.

Massimiliano Gioni

• Artistic director | The New Museum

Massimiliano Gioni has long been one of the most influential curators shaping the intellectual climate of contemporary art. Known for his conceptually and encyclopedically ambitious exhibitions such as “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the 2013 Venice Biennale and “The Great Mother” in Milan, he blends rigorous scholarship and curatorial inventiveness with humanistic acuity. “I try to make shows that still entail a process of discovery,” he told Observer earlier this year. “When staging shows, they must be somewhat physically and visually memorable. If I think of a room in an exhibition, I need to be able to read it at once as a whole and then go into the details. But it doesn’t mean it should be clear to the point that it’s so transparent you don’t want to engage with it.” Under his leadership, the New Museum—now reopening after a major renovation—has become a crucible for experimental practices and cross-generational dialogue. Gioni’s work bridges European and American perspectives, reaffirming the New Museum’s role as an institution where boldness meets philosophical depth.

Cecilia Alemani

• Artistic director | High Line Art

Cecilia Alemani, curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale, has been internationally celebrated for her lucid, imaginative and politically resonant curatorial language. Conceived during the pandemic, her groundbreaking Venice exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” reframed surrealism through a feminist and posthuman lens, positioning imagination as an act of resistance in a time of destruction and crisis. In addition to her ambitious public art commissions along the High Line, this year she curated the widely acclaimed SITE SANTA FE International, continuing to merge conceptual sophistication with accessibility. “You see a contemporary art exhibition, but something is slightly different,” she said, giving Observer a window into her concept. “When you get close to the art, you will see that it is the telling of the story of a person. They might be a healer,  a writer or even just a character from a book and this could be illustrated with a story, but also maybe with an object they left behind. It doesn’t need to be an art object. It can be like a matchbox in their pocket or a cup they were drinking from. That story will let you see the art around you differently.” Ultimately, Alemani’s exhibitions transform public space into sites of archetypal and mythic encounter, fostering collective reflection and universal understanding.

Pedro Alonzo

• Independent curator

Pedro Alonzo has built an international reputation for transforming public space into a curatorial medium. Formerly adjunct curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Dallas Contemporary, he has long bridged institutional exhibitions and civic-scale interventions, organizing projects such as “Open Source: Engaging Audiences in Public Space” in Philadelphia and “Art & the Landscape” with The Trustees in Massachusetts, commissioning artists including Doug AItken, Alicja Kwade and Jeppe Hein. His recent curatorial roles—as curator of “Noor Riyadh” in Saudi Arabia in 2023 and artistic director of the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial this year—demonstrate the potential of public art as both an agent of change and a tool for civic dialogue, transforming urban environments into platforms for inclusive, community-based and transformative storytelling. “I realized Boston is a city operating on a global scale, with far-reaching impact,” he told Observer during a walkthrough of the Triennial. “The question became: how can we connect artists to that energy, to those networks and allow their work to respond, resonate and contribute to amplify or make more accessible or more impactful this knowledge and talent?”

Doryun Chong

• Artistic director and chief curator | M+

Doryun Chong is actively redefining how Asia’s recent artistic history is understood and experienced, while paving the way for a fuller appreciation of some of the region’s most promising emerging talents. Formerly at MoMA and the Guggenheim, he has long championed transnational rather than regional frameworks for Asian art, emphasizing cultural circulation over fixed geography or limiting categories. At M+, Chong has helped build a curatorial ecosystem that integrates art, architecture, design and film, reflecting the multiplicity of contemporary life while situating Hong Kong as a critical node between local heritage and global culture. His recent international projects—including the landmark Lee Bul exhibition at Leeum Museum and “Prism of the Real” in Tokyo—extend this vision beyond the museum’s walls, underscoring his commitment to presenting Asia’s artistic narratives with intellectual depth, regional rootedness and international resonance.

Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath

• Co-directors | Hamburger Bahnhof

The curatorial duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath exemplify the rise of collaborative curatorship as a form of global translation. Over the past decade, they have curated major biennials and museum exhibitions that traverse cultures and histories with intellectual dexterity. At Hamburger Bahnhof, they are reshaping the museum’s curatorial direction toward greater inclusivity and international dialogue. Bardaouil, in conversation with Observer, has described the programming at Hamburger Bahnhof as being in a “continuous state of becoming”—never static, always porous. “It is shaped by artists who confront the urgencies of our time with the courage of their imagination.” It may come down to his and Fellrath’s unique curatorial partnership, which blurs the line between institutional leadership and artistic collaboration, offering a model for museums in flux—rooted in plurality and community engagement rather than hierarchy. Most recently, the pair curated the 14th Taipei Biennial, titled “Whispers on the Horizon,” which explores themes of collective yearning and shared futures.

Ebony L. Haynes

• Global head of curatorial projects | David Zwirner

Ebony L. Haynes has carved out a distinct role within the commercial art ecosystem, transforming David Zwirner’s 52 Walker in Tribeca into a locus of critical inquiry and museum-caliber exhibition-making, redefining what a blue-chip gallery can be. Her vision—of a research-led, time-based, and multimedia space that privileges ideas over transactions—led to her recent appointment as global head of curatorial projects at Zwirner, formal recognition of her role in pushing the gallery’s scope beyond the purely commercial. Since inaugurating 52 Walker with Kandis Williams’s “A Line” (October 2021-January 2022), Haynes has curated a series of conceptually sharp and visually disciplined exhibitions with Nikita Gale, Nora Turato and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Each show has interrogated systems of race, identity, performance and language through minimalist yet charged forms that command both academic and collector attention. Her approach positions Black artistic production not as a thematic niche but as a structural force shaping the discourse of contemporary art. One of Haynes’s most notable curatorial interventions came with the 2023 exhibition “Bob Thompson: So let us all be citizens,” a deftly staged landmark revival of the late artist’s work that reaffirmed her commitment to rewriting art-historical narratives and bridging institutional and commercial contexts. Haynes’s curatorial independence within one of the world’s most powerful galleries stands as proof that institutional critique can still thrive within a commercial infrastructure.