About Paola Antonelli

Paola Antonelli joined The Museum of Modern Art in 1994 and is a Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture & Design, as well as MoMA’s founding Director of Research & Development. She has curated numerous shows at MoMA and in other international institutions. She has lectured worldwide in settings ranging from peer conferences to global interdisciplinary gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, and she has served on several international architecture and design juries. She has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Harvard Graduate School of Design; and the MFA programs of the School of Visual Arts in New York. The recipient of a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1990, Paola Antonelli holds Honorary Doctorate degrees from the Royal College of Art and from Kingston University, London, from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and from Pratt Institute in New York. She earned the “Design Mind” Smithsonian Institution’s National Design Award in October 2006, and in 2007, she was named one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries by Time magazine. In 2011, she was inducted in the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and in 2015, she received the AIGA Medal. Paola Antonelli’s goal is to insistently promote design’s understanding, until its positive influence on the world is universally acknowledged. Her recent online experiment, Design and Violence, launched for MoMA in collaboration with co-curator Jamer Hunt, has become a new paragon for curatorial practice and communication. She recently curated the exhibition Items: Is Fashion Modern?; and is working on Design Bites, a book about foods from all over the world appreciated as examples of outstanding design; and on a book collecting her essays on the different fields of contemporary design. She can be found on Twitter as @CuriousOctopus, and on Instagram as @paolantonelli