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 presented by the High Line in New York. Over her fourteen-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. In 2025, she curated Once Within A Time, the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, which for the first time in the biennial's history extended its presentation across fourteen partner institutions and unconventional venues across the city of Santa Fe. 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 was visited by over 800,000 visitors. She previously served as the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Her leadership roles also include serving as the Artistic Director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires in 2018.
In recent years, Alemani has curated several exhibitions, including Willem de Kooning – Endless Painting (2025) and Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self (2023), both at Gagosian Gallery in New York. She organized Making Their Mark, the first public presentation of the Shah Garg Collection, a major exhibition showcasing the works of more than 80 women artists from the last eight decades, which traveled to 548 West 22nd Street, New York (2023), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2024), the Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2025), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2026). Additionally, she curated Anu Põder: Space for My Body at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland (2024), the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work presented outside Estonia. Over the past twenty years, Alemani has developed an expertise in commissioning and producing ambitious artworks for public space and unconventional sites, consistently challenging the traditional boundaries between art, architecture, and the urban fabric.
Courtesy the High Line, photo Liz Ligon