Cecilia Alemani
Director of the Visual Arts Department
Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York.
Since 2011, she has been the Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the program of public art of the renowned urban park built on an elevated railroad in New York. In addition to commissioning and producing ambitious projects with some of today's most influential artists such as El Anatsui, John Baldessari, Phyllida Barlow, Carol Bove, Sheila Hicks, Rashid Johnson, Barbara Kruger, Ibrahim Mahama, Faith Ringgold, Ed Ruscha, Nari Ward and Adrián Villar Rojas, she also launched the High Line Plinth, a new program of monumental works inaugurated in June 2019 with Brick House, a sculpture by the artist Simone Leigh and followed by Untitled (drone) by Sam Durant.
In 2017, Alemani curated the Italian Pavilion at 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Titled Il Mondo Magico (The Magical World), the exhibition featured new large-scale, site-specific commissions by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Adelita Husni-Bey, and Roberto Cuoghi.
In 2018, she was the Artistic Director of the first edition of Art Basel Cities, a new initiative in partnership with Buenos Aires to celebrate the city’s thriving cultural ecosystem. Alemani curated a city-wide exhibition titled Hopscotch (Rayuela) that featured 18 works in close dialogue with their venues, shaping a multilayered experience that connected visual art, urban spaces, and the city’s histories in unexpected ways. Among the participating artists were Eduardo Basualdo, Pia Camil, Maurizio Cattelan, Gabriel Chaile, Leandro Katz, Luciana Lamothe, Ad Minoliti and Stan VanDerBeek.
Before taking on these roles, Alemani worked as an independent curator collaborating with museums such as Tate Modern (London) and MoMA PS1 (New York), non-profit institutions such as Artists Space and Art in General (New York), and private foundations such as the Deste Foundation. From 2009 to 2010 she directed the experimental exhibition space X Initiative in New York, where she curated exhibitions by Keren Cytter, Derek Jarman, Hans Haacke, Tris Vonna-Mitchell and many others.
Alemani received her BA in Philosophy from the Università degli Studi in Milan and her MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has served as a contributor to numerous publications, including Artforum.com and Mousse Magazine, and has had a regular column in D, Repubblica since October 2019.
