Exhibition

Joseph Grima

Joseph Grima is an architect, writer, curator, and researcher based in Genoa, Italy. Grima recently curated the 2014 Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, Belgium, one of Europe’s oldest design biennials, and he was Co-Curator of the first edition of the Istanbul Design Biennial, a major international exhibition inaugurated in 2012. He was the 2015 Director of IDEAS CITY, an ideas festival organized by the New Museum in New York and dedicated to exploring the future of cities. As Artistic Director for Matera 2019, he is developing a cultural program that will prepare the Italian city of Matera for its role as Europe’s Capital City of Culture in 2019.

From 2011 to 2013, Grima was Editor-in-Chief of Domus, a monthly magazine of architecture, design, and art. From 2007 to 2011, he served as Director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, a renowned non-profit gallery and exhibition space in New York, where he curated numerous exhibitions, symposia, conferences, and publications. He has also curated or participated in exhibitions in the Venice Architecture Biennale, Milan Triennale, New Museum in New York, Experimenta Design in Lisbon, Shenzhen–Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture\Urbanism, and many others. He was a member of the official jury for the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale directed by Kazuyo Sejima.

Grima is the author of several books, including Instant Asia (Skira, 2007), a critical overview of the recent work of young and emerging architecture practices across the Asian continent, and co-editor of Shift: SANAA and the New Museum (Lars Müller, 2008), and has contributed to numerous other books and publications. Over the past 10 years, he has written for a wide range of international magazines, including Icon, AD, Abitare, Tank, Volume, An Arkitektur, ID, and Urban China.

He has taught and lectured widely in Europe, Asia, and America and was previously a lecturer at the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, Russia, under the direction of Rem Koolhaas.

Sarah Herda

Since 2006, Sarah Herda has been Director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation is the largest foundation in the United States committed to awarding project-based grants to individuals and institutions working at the forefront of architecture; it also produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. Herda is credited with transforming the foundation’s headquarters, the historic Madlener House, into a world-class public venue for architecture exhibitions and building one of Chicago’s most celebrated venues for public programs. In addition to hosting internationally renowned architects, artists, historians, and critics to present their work, Herda has produced an exhibition program featuring the work of Cecil Balmond, Thomas Demand, Bjarke Ingels, Nancy Holt, Judy Ledgerwood, Stanley Tigerman, Anne Tyng, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi, among others.

From 1998 until 2006, Herda was Director and Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture, an experimental exhibition space founded in New York City in 1982 that is recognized internationally as a vital platform for emerging ideas. While at Storefront, Herda collaborated with hundreds of architects and artists on a variety of projects, including more than 40 exhibitions.

Before being named Director of Storefront, Herda was Director of the Center for Critical Architecture/Art and Architecture Exhibition Space in San Francisco, and she also worked in architectural publishing at the Monacelli Press.

Herda teaches at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she has frequently been an invited critic and speaker at institutions such as the Architectural Association, London; Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York; Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge; IIT College of Architecture, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Princeton University School of Architecture; and University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ann Arbor, among others.

Currently, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Architecture Organizations, as well as on advisory boards for The Architect’s Newspaper, LAXART, the Mills College Art Museum, and Storefront for Art and Architecture. Herda is an Emerging Leader, class of 2015, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In 2009, she was named one of Icon magazine’s 20/20—a list of 20 architects and 20 designers who are changing the way we work and think.