How Women Curators Are Transforming Global Biennales and Art Fairs
From Venice to Dakar, from London to São Paulo and Basel, women curators are quietly but decisively changing what the global art world looks like. They are rewriting official narratives, rebalancing who gets seen, and rethinking how biennales and fairs connect to their cities. At the same time, the biennial circuit itself has exploded: more than three hundred such events now take place worldwide, compared with fewer than thirty in the early 1990s, making curatorial decisions more visible and politically charged than ever.
Within museums and large institutions, this shift is reinforced by demographics. The 2022 Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey, conducted by Ithaka S+R with the Mellon Foundation and US museum associations, found that women now hold around 66 percent of leadership posts, and more than 75 percent of “intellectual leadership” roles such as curators, educators and conservators. In other words, the people framing exhibitions, commissioning works and writing wall texts are now predominantly women. Biennales and international exhibitions are where that new majority is most visible.
How Are Women Redefining the Power Structures of Biennales?
Biennales are large, recurring exhibitions that set a thematic snapshot of contemporary art every two years or so, usually outside the normal museum circuit. As their number has grown to roughly 300 worldwide, they have become a de facto editorial system for global art, deciding which regions, mediums and stories are “current”.
In this ecosystem, the curator’s role is closer to that of an editor in chief than a simple organiser, and women are increasingly occupying that role.
Key point
As biennales multiply, women curators act as powerful gatekeepers and translators, deciding which artists and narratives circulate globally.
Their influence is not only about taste. Female curators often bring training in postcolonial studies, gender theory and social history, which tends to favour multi-voiced, research-heavy projects over single-artist blockbusters. In practical terms, that often means shifting attention away from a narrow Western canon and towards underrepresented geographies and lived experiences.
Typical levers where this shift is visible include:
Rebalancing line-ups towards artists from the global South and Indigenous communities
Commissioning long-term research projects rather than one-off spectacular installations
Building advisory circles with activists, writers and local groups, not only museum insiders
Experimenting with formats that mix performance, archives, film and community programming
This does not mean that all women curate in the same way, but the aggregate effect is clear: biennales become less about national prestige and more about complex, sometimes uncomfortable conversations around race, climate, labour and technology.
What Has Changed at Venice, Dakar and London?
The Venice Biennale is still the symbolic centre of the biennial universe, and its 59th edition in 2022 was a watershed. Curated by Italian curator Cecilia Alemani, “The Milk of Dreams” was the first Venice edition led by an Italian woman, and, crucially, it reversed the gender ratio of previous years. Of the 213 artists in the central exhibition, the vast majority were women or gender non-conforming; some analyses estimated a nine to one ratio compared with male artists, an unprecedented shift in the event’s 120-year history.
Key point
Venice 2022 turned women and non-binary artists from the exception into the default, sending a strong signal to other international exhibitions.
Alemani’s curatorial strategy combined historical “time capsules” with contemporary commissions, foregrounding Surrealist women, overlooked mystics and speculative sci-fi narratives. Instead of a single heroic storyline, visitors encountered overlapping timelines: feminist re-readings of technology, non-human perspectives on ecology, and queer re-imaginings of bodies and machines.
Elsewhere on the circuit, Senegal’s Dak’Art has become a laboratory for African curatorial leadership. For the 15th edition in 2024, Franco-Senegalese curator, critic and composer Salimata Diop served as artistic director, the first woman to lead the Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar. Under the title “The Wake”, she brought together 58 artists from across the continent and its diaspora around themes of memory, ecological crisis and Black futurities, while deliberately opening the event up to a much broader local public, from school groups to TikTok-driven visitors. Rather than treating the Old Courthouse as a neutral container, Diop approached it as a charged colonial space to be re-scripted through sound, light and performance, turning Dak’Art into a conversation about how African institutions remember, mourn and imagine otherwise.
London, for its part, offers a dense cluster of large-scale exhibitions and fairs led by women. The 2021 London Design Biennale was steered by British artist and stage designer Es Devlin as artistic director, who chose the theme “Resonance” and invited participants from nearly 30 countries to explore design’s ripple effects on society.
At the same time, figures such as Eva Langret at Frieze London and Zoé Whitley at Chisenhale (and formerly Tate Modern’s “Soul of a Nation” co-curator) have pushed London’s exhibition culture towards more inclusive narratives of Black, diasporic and feminist histories. In their day-to-day work, managing press images, online previews and loan documentation, it is telling that something as mundane as a png to jpg converter has become part of the curatorial toolkit, sitting alongside reading lists and wall plans in shaping how audiences encounter artworks on screen.
How Are Latin American Biennials and Art Basel Embracing Female Leadership?
Latin America’s biennials have historically used the format to renegotiate their position in global art history, and women curators have been central to this process. The 34th Bienal de São Paulo, one of the continent’s flagship events, was structured around a curatorial team that included guest curators Carla Zaccagnini and Ruth Estévez, alongside chief curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti and others. The following edition abandoned the idea of a single chief curator altogether in favour of a collective that included Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba and Brazilian curators Diane Lima and Hélio Menezes, signalling a move towards shared authorship.
Key point
In São Paulo and other Latin American biennials, women curators are not just adding diversity; they are redesigning governance models around collective, decolonial decision making.
These curators use the biennial format as a way to connect local histories of dictatorship, extractivism and social struggle with transnational conversations. They often stretch the exhibition beyond a single venue into city-wide constellations of museums, community spaces and public sites, blurring the line between biennial, festival and urban research lab.
Recurring features of these female-led Latin American projects include:
Emphasis on archives, oral histories and intergenerational feminist lineages
Strong partnerships with local universities, grass-roots groups and Indigenous organisations
Programming that alternates large-scale installations with intimate, process-based works
Curatorial texts that cite thinkers from the region instead of defaulting to European theory
These approaches also demand new back-end infrastructures. Managing hundreds of artists spread over multiple institutions means working across time zones, budgets and file formats. Curators and registrars routinely rely on shared drives, collaborative annotation tools and basic utilities such as a png to jpg converter to standardise images for print catalogues, social media and press kits. The technical choices may seem minor, but they directly influence which works are easier to circulate, reproduce or license.
On the commercial side of the ecosystem, Art Basel offers a revealing snapshot. Since 2023, the flagship Basel fair has been led by Maike Cruse, previously director of Gallery Weekend Berlin. A 2025 overview from Art Basel highlights that three of the fair’s four current show directors are women: Cruse in Basel, Bridget Finn in Miami Beach and Angelle Siyang-Le in Hong Kong, with Clément Delépine in Paris. Their role is hybrid, sitting between curatorial and market logic: orchestrating curated sections, public programmes and city partnerships while also looking after galleries’ commercial needs. In that hybrid space, a png to jpg converter is part of the invisible infrastructure behind online viewing rooms, condition reports and sponsorship decks that enable artworks to travel from biennale halls to collectors’ screens.
What Does This Shift Mean for the Future of Global Art?
For all these gains, structural imbalances remain. The Mellon-backed staff survey shows that while women now dominate curatorial and educational roles, leadership remains less diverse by race: white staff still make up the majority of directors and top managers, and people of colour remain under-represented in senior decision making. In other words, the “feminisation” of curatorial work has not automatically solved questions of class, race or geographic bias. There is a risk that women carry the emotional and logistical burden of “inclusion” without having full control over budgets or governance.
Key point
Women curators have gained visibility and influence, but the deeper questions of institutional power and long-term resources are still unresolved.
Looking ahead, the main fault lines are less about whether women curate major events and more about how they can reshape the terms of production. Key challenges include:
Securing sustainable funding models that do not rely on short-term precarity or unpaid labour
Reducing the environmental footprint of international exhibitions while keeping mobility for artists
Avoiding tokenistic gender or regional quotas in favour of long-term structural change
Creating pathways for curators from the global South to lead not only “regional” shows but also core European and North American institutions
At the same time, new pressures are emerging around technology and public attention. Audiences now often encounter biennale projects for the first time on a phone screen rather than in a gallery. This makes visual clarity, captioning and contextual information as important as the physical installation. Women curators, many of whom have grown up working across social media, video conferencing and digital archives, are well placed to think across both spaces. Their choices about which images to foreground, which details to crop out and how to format an installation view can change the perceived meaning of a work as much as any wall text.
Ultimately, the revolution led by women curators is not only about representation but about reconfiguring how power, knowledge and care circulate in the art world. From Alemani’s majority-female Venice, through N’Goné Fall’s insistence on African curatorial control at Dakar, to Latin American collective models and female-led fairs at Art Basel and Frieze, the contours of global art are being redrawn. The next measure of success will be whether these changes become embedded in institutions’ long-term structures, or remain dependent on a handful of standout individuals.
FAQ
Why are women curators so prominent in biennales right now?
Because the number of biennales has grown and museums have hired more women into curatorial and leadership roles, their influence is now more visible on the highest-profile stages.
Did the Venice Biennale really feature mostly women artists in 2022?
Yes. Under Cecilia Alemani’s direction, the 2022 central exhibition included an overwhelming majority of women and gender non-conforming artists, reversing the traditional male bias.
What makes Dak’Art in Dakar important in this discussion?
Dak’Art has been a key platform for African curators like N’Goné Fall, who have insisted that African biennales be shaped by local expertise rather than external curatorial voices.
How do Latin American biennials differ from European ones?
Latin American biennials such as São Paulo often use collective curatorial teams, city-wide programmes and decolonial frameworks that connect local histories of struggle with global debates.
Why mention art fairs like Art Basel when talking about curators?
Art fairs are where the market, institutions and biennales intersect; women directing fairs in Basel, Miami or Hong Kong influence which artists gain visibility and how curated narratives reach collectors and museums.
