Executive Board

Rafal Niemojewski, Executive Director
Daniel Steinberg, Treasurer
Isobel Whitelegg, Secretary
James Dubin
Ellen Kahn
Francis Piderit

Advisory Board

Elena Filipovic
Caroline A. Jones
Terry Smith

BF Digital and Editorial

Rafal Niemojewski, Editor
Andrew Warden, Editor
Henrietta Landells, Editor
Volodymyr Rets, Developer
Media Temple, Hosting
Solar Initiative, Graphic Design

BF Magazine Contributors

Kara Blackmore
Elizabeth Derderian
Melissa Gronlund
Rose Lejeune
Maria Lind
Zeenat Nagree
Shwetal Patel
Vincent Pruden
Anca Rujoiu
Terry Smith
Vinicius Spricigo
John L. Tran
Vladimir Vidmar
Andrew Stefan Weiner

BF Events

Alessandra Chiericato
Manca Bajec
Marco Miglioranza
Vija Skangale
Isobel Wohl

Biographies:

Manca Bajec is an artist and scholar whose multidisciplinary work is situated in the field of space/time, memory and sociopolitical studies. After earning BA from the Academy of Fine Art in Venice, she continued her studies in Ljubljana while working in theatres as stage designer and performer. In 2010 she earned MA in Curating from University of the Arts in London, focusing on memory and monument building. She was nominated for the emerging artist ESSL Award in 2010 and was an Ashley Family Foundation Fellow in 2011. Bajec has spoken at conferences worldwide and was Visiting Tutor at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited and published her work internationally with Eros Press, Mnemoscape among others. Last year, she earned doctoral degree from the Royal College of Art for her research on destruction of monuments. Bajec who grew up in the Middle East presently lives and works in London.

Kara Blackmore is a curator and writer who works at the intersection of arts, heritage and social justice. To reflect on more than a decade of practice she is undertaking a PhD at the London School of Economics. Kara is also the curator for the Politics of Return research project housed at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa. Recent pop-up exhibitions, curatorial interventions, and site-specific installations including: Sketching Violence (Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, Johannesburg), Enduring Exile (Uganda Museum, Kampala/London School of Economics and Political Science), The Colonial Crime Scene (IZIKO South African Museum, Cape Town), Weights and Measures: Portraits of Justice (Constitution Hill, Johannesburg).

Currently based in Dubai, Elizabeth Derderian is a cultural anthropologist and PhD candidate at Northwestern University. She holds an MA in Near Eastern and Museum Studies from NYU, and received a Fulbright to conduct research for her PhD dissertation on the development of arts and cultural initiatives in the UAE.

James M. Dubin is Executive Chairman of Conair Corporation. He is also the managing partner of Madison Place Partners, LLC, a financial and organizational consulting firm. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Conair, Emmis Communications Corporation and Omega Flex, Inc., and has also served as a member of the Board of Directors of Carnival Corporation & plc. He is Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University and a past chair of its Buchmann Faculty of Law. He is a former Chairman of The National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and a former President of the Board of Trustees of Williston Northampton School. He has also served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Ballet Theatre, the Miami City Ballet, the Presidential Scholars Foundation, the Jewish Home Lifecare system and as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester. Mr. Dubin retired as a senior partner of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Harrison LLP, where he served for many years as chair of the firm’s Corporate Department, a member of its Management Committee and chair of its Finance Committee. Mr. Dubin received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Juris Doctor from Columbia University School of Law where he served as an editor of the Columbia Law Review and was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.

Elena Filipovic is Director Kunsthalle Basel, Curator of the 5th edition of Berlin Biennial (2008), Co-editor of The Biennial Reader (2010);

Melissa Gronlund is a writer in London who specializes in art of the Arab world and moving-image practice. She is the author of Contemporary Art and Digital Culture (Routledge).

Caroline A. Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Trained in visual studies and art history at Harvard, she did graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York before completing her PhD at Stanford University in 1992. Previous to completing her art history degree, she worked in museum administration and exhibition curation, holding positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85) while she completed two documentary films. In addition to these institutions, her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Hara Museum Tokyo, the Boston University Art Gallery, and MIT’s List Visual Art Center, among other venues. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (among others), and has been honored by fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies (2013-14), the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College (2009-10), Institute national d’histoire de l’art in Paris (2006-07), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Max Planck Institüt (2001-02), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1994-95), and the Stanford Humanities Center (1986-87). Her books include Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005), Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996/98); Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965 (1990); and Modern Art at Harvard (1985). She edited Sensorium: Embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (2006) and co-edited Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998) and Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (2016). She has published on subjects ranging from Francis Picabia to John Cage to new media art to biennial culture, in journals such as Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Res, Science in Context, CAA reviews online, Texte zur Kunst, and Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne. Jones’s ongoing research interests include globalism, the agency of the artist, and new media art, the focus of her latest book The Global Work of Art (2016).

Rose Lejeune is a curator based in London. Through projects with public museums and private individuals she helps commission and acquire artworks for collections with a focus on context-based, performative and ephemeral practices. Researching immateriality in the art market, Rose is a doctoral candidate in Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator based in Stockholm and Berlin. She was the director of Tensta konsthall, Stockholm (2011–18), the director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008–10), and of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005–07). From 2002 to 2004 she was the director of Kunstverein München; in 2016 she was the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale. Maria Lind is also the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

Rafal Niemojewski is a cultural producer and scholar of contemporary art and its institutions. He graduated in History of Art and Curatorial Studies from La Sorbonne and earned his doctorate degree from the Royal College of Art in London for his thesis on the proliferation of the contemporary biennial. More recently, his research interests have expanded to include history of exhibitions and institutions in relation to the changing ecology of the expanded artistic field. Niemojewski has lectured extensively on the topic of biennials and his writings appeared in numerous journals and books, including The Manifesta Decade (MIT Press, 2006), Biennial Reader (Hatje Cantz, 2010) and The New Curator (Laurence King, 2016). He worked in capacity of Assistant and Associate Professor at Central Saint Martins, Sotheby’s Institute, Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm), and Course Director at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Outside academia, Niemojewski has led projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Bergen Kunsthall, Manifesta and dOCUMENTA(13), and worked as Curator of Programs at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre and Director of Programs and Education at the Neuberger Museum of Art. Since 2013 he has been working as accredited Expert at the Education, Culture and Audiovisual Executive Agency (EACEA) and Research Executive Agency (REA) at the European Commission. He has been collaborating with Biennial Foundation since 2009 and became its director in 2016.

Shwetal A Patel is a writer, researcher and consultant working at the intersection of contemporary art, exhibition-making practices, and development theory. He is a founding member of India’s first visual arts biennial, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and holds a practice-based PhD from University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art. He has operated internationally, primarily in Europe and Asia and has contributed widely to journals, magazines and academic conferences. He is a Trustee of the Milton Keynes Museum, an advisor to the Kolkota Centre for Creativity and an editorial board member of OnCurating.org (Zürich University of the Arts).

Anca Rujoiu is a curator and editor based in Singapore and Romania. As curator of exhibitions and later head of publications (2013–18), she was a member of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She was co-curator of Collective Fictions, one of the selected projects in Nouvelles Vagues (2013), a program by Palais de Tokyo dedicated to young curators.

Terry Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Theory at the European Graduate School. In 2010 he received the Franklin Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA) and the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award (Commonwealth of Australia). From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of many books, most recently Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: ICI, 2012), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011), and What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009). A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.

Daniel Steinberg studied graphic design and digital media at Drexel University in Philadelphia and earned his Master’s in Information Systems from the same institution. With a particular appreciation for modern architecture, environmental design and wayfinding, and information graphics, he brings over a decade of graphic and user interface design experience to the Board, advising in technical matters. Daniel lives just outside of Seattle and works for a California-based technology company.

John L Tran is an artist and writer. He studied Intellectual History & French at Sussex University 1983-87. He received an MA in Photography at the London College of Printing in 2001 and a PhD from Chelsea College of Art and Design, investigating nostalgia in Japanese landscape photography. He was Assistant Professor at Institute of Art and Design, Tsukuba University, Japan 2006-2010. Currently a part-time lecturer at Nihon University and a regular contributor to the Japan Times.

Andrew Stefan Weiner is Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Criticism in the Department of Art and Art Professions at NYU–Steinhardt. He writes regularly on contemporary art, and is a member of the editorial collective of ARTMargins.

Isobel Whitelegg is Director of the School of Museum Studies Postgraduate Research programmes and MA Art Museum & Gallery Studies, University of Leicester. Her main area of research and interest looks at contemporary institutions and art in a global context. A specialist in Latin American art, Isobel’s work also examines collections that aren’t held and displayed in traditional museum settings.