Gail Silver Memorial Lecture

Paola Antonelli is senior curator of architecture and design and director of research and development at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work investigates design’s influence on everyday experience, often including overlooked objects and practices. She was appointed director of MOMA’s new research and development initiative in 2012. Antonelli lectures frequently at global conferences and coordinates cultural discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos. An inductee of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, she was recently rated one of the top 100 most powerful people in the world of art by Art Review.

Paola Antonelli joined The Museum of Modern Art in 1994 and is a Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture & Design, as well as MoMA’s founding Director of Research & Development. With a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan, Paola Antonelli has also earned Honorary Doctorate degrees from the Royal College of Art and Kingston University, London, the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and Pratt Institute in New York. She has curated numerous shows, lectured worldwide, and has served on several international architecture and design juries.

Her most recent exhibition, Items: Is Fashion Modern?, devoted to 111 items of clothing that have had a strong impact on the world in the past 100 years, opened at MoMA in October 2017. She is currently working on the next Triennale di Milano, entitled Broken Nature (March 2019); on the book States of Design; and on a new Theory of Everything for design.