Director of the Modern Art Centre since 2021

Born and raised in Paris, Benjamin Weil studied art history before moving to New York in 1985, where he worked as Assistant Curator for a major private art collection until 1989. He also attended the Curatorial Training Program of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (1987), and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program (graduating in 1989). He then worked as an independent curator and art critic, publishing regularly in specialized magazines – he also was a New York correspondent for Flash Art International (1992-95). In 1995, he co-founded Ada Web, the first digital studio dedicated to the production of art projects online and was its Artistic Director until 1997. In 1998, he was appointed as Director of the New Media Department at ICA London, before moving in 2000 to San Francisco, to assume the position of Curator of Media Arts at SFMOMA where he was responsible for the collection of Media Arts as well as of an exhibitions and a film program. He also launched a sound art program and commissioned art projects for the museum’s web site.

Weil returned to New York in 2006 to become the Executive Director of Artists Space; he moved back to Europe in 2009 to teach at the IUAV University of Venice, where he directed a research laboratory for doctoral students of visual arts. That year, he was appointed as Artistic Director at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, a new institution dedicated to the production and presentation of new forms resulting from the creative use of technology (2009-13). In 2014, he became the Artistic Director of Centro Botín (Santander, 2014-20), where he also curated numerous monographic exhibitions, and themed group exhibitions featuring works from the collection of Fundación Botín he was also responsible for during his tenure at Centro Botín.

Aside from regularly lecturing on contemporary art and participating in numerous juries – including the one of the Prince of Asturias Awards (2012 and 2013) – Benjamin Weil has conceptualized and directed H BOX, a video art commissioning and peripatetic exhibition project for Fondation d’entreprise Hermès (2005-11); he also curated Untitled (Orchestral), a site-specific installation by João Onofre at MAAT (Lisbon, 2017), among others.

He joined Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in early 2021 to assume the position of Director of CAM (Centro de Arte Moderna)