In its final year, SVA’s MA Curatorial Practice program celebrates its faculty with a panel on curatorial education and practice.
In the valedictory year of the master’s degree program in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts, the program will host a series of special panel discussions to celebrate its extraordinary faculty, which includes world-renowned curators and experts. The focus of these panels, which we believe will be of value to curators, educators, and students in the field, will be on the experiences of our faculty in shaping curatorial education, with the specific goal of readying young professionals for their work. These discussions will cover both practice and theory, taking into account social, political, economic, and technological conditions directly affecting cultural institutions, artistic and curatorial research, and curatorial labor today, with an outlook toward the future.
Our first panel, moderated by Steven Henry Madoff, the program’s Founding Chair, includes Charles Renfro, Chrissie Iles, Katherine Rochester, and Tamsin Dillon.
Charles Renfro is a partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a world-renowned interdisciplinary design studio that integrates the performing arts, visual arts, and architecture. He led design for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the redesign and expansion of the Juilliard School/Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Blur Building in Switzerland, the Creative Arts Center at Brown University, the High Line, the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, and the Stanford University McMurtry Art & Art History Building. His work with DS+R has been exhibited worldwide at many museums and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Centre Pompidou.
Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her curatorial focus is contemporary art, film and video, and art of the 1960s and 1970s, from a global perspective. Her exhibitions at the Whitney include co-curating three Whitney Biennials in 2004, 2006, and the 2024 Biennial Even Better Than the Real Thing. Other exhibitions include Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want to Tell You, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1905-2016, and Cauleen Smith: Sojourner. Previously, Chrissie was Head of Exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Art History by Bristol University, U.K. in 2015.
Katherine Rochester is a New York-based art historian and curator, and an editor at Artforum. She was previously the curatorial director at Lehmann Maupin gallery and director of curatorial research at VIA Art Fund. Previously, Rochester was at the Getty Research Institute, where she co-curated exhibitions such as Monumentality (2018) and Bauhaus Beginnings (2019). Prior to the Getty, she held positions at the ICA Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center. She has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Getty Research Institute, and her scholarship has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Tamsin Dillon is the founder and director of Art in Public, established in 2020, with projects in the US and the UK. In a career spanning 30 years, her primary focus has been on curating ambitious temporary and permanent artworks and projects with artists in the public realm and the built environment. Dillon has shaped important programs, such as London’s Art on the Underground, where she was the director from 2002 to 2014. In 2021, she curated Waterfronts for England’s Creative Coast: a collection of seven major temporary public artworks around the coast of South East England. In 2021-22, Dillon developed a strategy for 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, California, as a roadmap to develop socially engaged contemporary public art projects across the city. In 2022-23, she worked with Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City as its executive director.