Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program of the High Line. Over her fifteen-year tenure, she has overseen major commissions by many of today’s most influential artists and spearheaded the High Line Plinth, a landmark program for monumental contemporary sculpture. Her practice is committed to realizing first-time public projects by artists who have not previously worked at this scale or within the complexities of the urban landscape.
Alemani is the curator of the 15th Taipei Biennial, which will open in 2027. In 2025, she curated Once Within a Time, the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, the first edition to extend across fourteen partner institutions and venues throughout the city. From 2020 to 2022, she served as the Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams, which drew over 800,000 visitors. She was previously the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and the Artistic Director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires in 2018.
In recent years, Alemani has curated several exhibitions, including Moteur Imaginaire (2026), the inaugural exhibition at Le Large in Paris; Costantino Nivola: Sculpting the Wind (2026) at the Triennale Milano; and Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting (2025) and Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self (2023), both at Gagosian in New York. She organized Making Their Mark, the first public presentation of the Shah Garg Collection, featuring more than 80 women artists from the last eight decades, which opened in New York in 2023 and has since traveled to museums across the United States. Additionally, she curated Anu Põder: Space for My Body at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland (2024), the artist’s first major retrospective outside Estonia.
Courtesy the High Line, photo Liz Ligon