Fundação Bienal de São Paulo announces curatorial team for its 37th edition

The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo has announced the curatorial team for the 37th Bienal de São Paulo, scheduled to open in September 2027.

Led by chief curators Amanda Carneiro and Raphael Fonseca, the nine-person team brings together curators and researchers working across Latin America, Europe, North America, Oceania and the Caribbean.

Ana Salazar Herrera, Léuli Eshrāghi, Rado Ištok, Ryan Inouye and Yina Jiménez Suriel will join the edition as curators, while Amanda Tavares and Mayara Carvalho have been appointed curatorial assistants.

According to Carneiro and Fonseca, the team’s members are connected through a shared interest in Brazil, the Bienal de São Paulo and collaborative approaches to curatorial practice. Their combined experience encompasses research, critical writing, community-based work and the development of large-scale international projects.

“For us, assembling this team is also a way of affirming a mode of working grounded in relationships, listening, dedication to artists, and attention to the conditions that make each practice possible,” the chief curators said. They described the Bienal as a platform for “research, imagination, encounter, and meaningful engagement.”

Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, said the appointments reaffirm the Bienal’s historic role as a space for dialogue between different cultural, artistic and political contexts.

The curatorial team

Ana Salazar Herrera is an Ecuadorian and Portuguese curator whose work explores nomadic, polylinguistic and transcultural subjectivities. She co-founded the Museum for the Displaced and is currently a curatorial research associate at the Diriyah Biennale Foundation. Her previous roles include co-curator of the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, interim curator at Ludwig Forum Aachen and assistant curator at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

Léuli Eshrāghi is an artist, poet and curator working across Sāmoa, Australia and Canada. They are curator of Indigenous practices at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where their work encompasses exhibitions, collection development and relationships with Indigenous nations. Eshrāghi previously curated the TarraWarra Biennial 2023 and held a curatorial residency at the University of Queensland Art Museum.

Rado Ištok is a Slovak curator and art historian currently responsible for the Collection of Art since 1945 at the National Gallery Prague. His recent projects include No Feeling Is Final: The Skopje Solidarity Collection and the long-term collection display The Ballad of a Miner. His research also examines Czechoslovakia’s historical participation in the Bienal de São Paulo.

Ryan Inouye is curator of international art at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and co-curator of the 59th Carnegie International, opening in 2026. He previously worked at Sharjah Art Foundation and the New Museum in New York, contributing to exhibitions, residencies and programmes including Sharjah Biennial 12 and the 2012 New Museum Triennial.

Yina Jiménez Suriel is artistic co-director of the XIII Sequences Biennial in Iceland, curator of The Current IV at TBA21–Academy and associate editor of Contemporary And for Latin America and the Caribbean. Her practice develops transdisciplinary projects across the Caribbean, Latin America and their diasporic and oceanic connections.

The team is completed by Brazilian curatorial assistants Amanda Tavares and Mayara Carvalho. Tavares is an art historian, curator and researcher whose recent work includes projects for Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Instituto Tomie Ohtake and the 14th Bienal do Mercosul. Carvalho is a curator, writer, educator and producer whose practice examines the intersections of art, politics and ecology through an anti-colonial perspective. She recently participated in the New Curators Programme in London and co-curated an exhibition by Duane Linklater at Camden Art Centre.

The 37th Bienal de São Paulo is scheduled to open in September 2027.

Image caption: From left: Rado Ištok, Mayara Carvalho, Amanda Carneiro, Ryan Inouye, Yina Jiménez Suriel, Ana Salazar Herrera, Amanda Tavares, Raphael Fonseca and Léuli Eshrāghi. Photo: Camila Tuon / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.