From New York’s High Line to the Venice Biennale
Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York and one of the most influential figures in the international contemporary art scene. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York. Over her fourteen-year tenure, she has overseen major commissions by many of today’s most influential artists and spearheaded the High Line Plinth, a landmark program dedicated to monumental contemporary sculpture in public space. Her curatorial practice focuses on realizing ambitious first-time public projects by artists who have not previously worked at this scale or within the complex context of the urban landscape.
Over the past twenty years, Alemani has developed particular expertise in commissioning and producing artworks for public space and unconventional sites, often challenging traditional boundaries between art, architecture, and the urban environment. In 2025 she curated Once Within A Time, the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, which for the first time in the biennial’s history expanded across fourteen partner institutions and unconventional venues throughout the city of Santa Fe.
Alemani is also widely known for her role as Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale, held from 2020 to 2022, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams. The exhibition attracted more than 800,000 visitors and became one of the most discussed editions of the Biennale in recent decades. Earlier in her career, she served as curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 and as Artistic Director of the inaugural Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires.
In recent years, Alemani has curated several major exhibitions, including Willem de Kooning – Endless Painting and Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self, both presented at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. She also organized Making Their Mark, the first public presentation of the Shah Garg Collection, a major exhibition featuring works by more than 80 women artists from the past eight decades. The exhibition traveled to multiple institutions, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Kemper Art Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Among her recent projects is also Anu Põder: Space for My Body, presented at the Muzeum Susch, the first solo exhibition of the artist outside Estonia.
On Tuesday, March 10th at 6:30 PM, Alemani will be the guest of Casa IED for a public conversation about her work and her experience in the field of contemporary art. The event will take place at Salotto in Brooklyn and will be moderated by art writer and critic Maddie Hampton. The conversation will explore the role of curating today, the relationship between art and public space, and the transformations of the international art scene.
With this event, IED – Istituto Europeo di Design continues its program of encounters with leading voices in contemporary culture. Founded in 1966, IED is the largest European higher education network in the creative fields and carries a strong Italian cultural heritage while fostering international dialogue across art, design, fashion, and visual communication. Casa IED opens its doors as a place for dialogue and exchange where different perspectives and creative intelligences meet to reflect on contemporary culture and design.
