Home Appointments Artistic Director
Artistic Director
Venice Biennale
| Appointee | Cecilia Alemani |
|---|---|
| Role | Artistic Director |
| Organisation | Venice Biennale |
| Domain | Art Institutions |
| Start | 23 April 2022 |
| End | 27 November 2022 |
| Notes | First Italian woman to direct the Venice Biennale's central exhibition |
Institutional context
The Venice Biennale is the principal international contemporary-art exhibition, established in 1895 and held biennially. The artistic director of each edition is appointed by the Biennale board to curate the central exhibition. Alemani directed the 59th Venice Biennale, "The Milk of Dreams," in 2022. She is the first Italian woman to direct the Biennale's central exhibition.
Career path
Born in Italy in 1977, Alemani earned a BA in philosophy from the University of Milan and an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College. She has been Donald R. Mullen Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art in New York City since 2011. She curated the Italian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, presenting Il Mondo Magico.
Appointment
The Venice Biennale announced her appointment as artistic director of the 59th edition in January 2020; the exhibition originally scheduled for 2021 was postponed to 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition opened on 23 April 2022 and ran through 27 November 2022.
Tenure
Approximately seven months as the active period of the exhibition. The 59th Biennale featured a high proportion of women and non-binary artists in its central exhibition — itself a documented curatorial choice she described in pre-opening interviews.
Cluster context
Alemani's 2022 appointment is the most recent of the art-institutional cluster events recorded in the dataset. The compressed series of art-institutional firsts — Morris (2016), Feldman (2019), des Cars (2021), Alemani (2022) — across four of the most prominent international art institutions inside a six-year window is one of the dataset's clearer domain-specific clusters.