Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (1957, Ridgewood, New Jersey) is an Italian and American author, an organizer of events and exhibitions, and a researcher of artistic practices, the histories of art, and the politics of aesthetics and multispecies co-evolution. She is the Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea - Collezione Cerruti in Turin. She served as Chief Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center - A MoMA Affiliate in New York from 1999 to 2001, when she joined Castello di Rivoli as Chief curator. She curated the Sydney Biennial in 2008, followed by dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012, which explored issues of trauma, art and healing, mainly held in Kassel (Germany) and Kabul (Afghanistan), including programmes in Alexandria (Egypt) and Banff (Canada). She curated the 14th Istanbul Biennial in 2015. As a writer, Christov-Bakargiev has been interested in the relations between historical avant-gardes and contemporary art and has written extensively on the Arte Povera movement, such as in her book Arte Povera (Phaidon Press, 1999). She published the first monograph on the work of South African artist William Kentridge (1998) and has also curated exhibitions and written books on Fabio Mauri (1994); Alberto Burri (1996); Franz Kline (2004); Pierre Huyghe (2004); Giovanni Anselmo (2016); Ed Atkins (2017); Anna Boghiguian (2017); Wael Shawky (2017); Nalini Malani (2018); Hito Steyerl (2018); Anri Sala (2019); Michael Rakowitz (2019); Giusepe Penone (2019); Adrián Villar Rojas (2020); Anne Imhof (2020-2021), amongst others. She is currently working on an upcoming exhibition and book about Otobong Nkanga (2021).
She was a Getty Scholar in 2015 as well as a visiting professor at Northwestern University (2013-2019) and has lectured in universities worldwide, including Goethe University, Frankfurt; Harvard University, Cambridge; MIT, Boston; Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Dehli; Cooper Union, New York; Monash University, Melbourne; Di Tela University, Buenos Aires.
