Paola Antonelli

Paola Antonelli joined The Museum of Modern Art in 1994 and is a Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design. Her first exhibition for MoMA, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design (1995), was followed by Thresholds: Contemporary Design from the Netherlands (1996), Achille Castiglioni: Design! (1997-98), and Projects 66: Campana/Ingo Maurer (1999), Open Ends and Matter (September 2000–February 2001), Workspheres (February-April, 2001), Humble Masterpieces (July-September, 2004), and SAFE: Design Takes On Risk (October 2005-January 2006). Her upcoming Design and the Elastic Mind, an exhibition on science, design, and innovation, will open at MoMA on February 24, 2008.

Paola Antonelli has lectured worldwide in settings ranging from peer conferences to global interdisciplinary gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, and she has served on several international architecture and design juries. From 1991 to 1993, she was a Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has in the past few years also taught design history and theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts in New York.

The recipient of a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1990, Paola
Antonelli has curated several architecture and design exhibitions in Italy, France, and Japan.
She is a Senior Fellow with the Royal College of Art, London and received and Honorary
Doctorate in Design from Kingston University, London. Paola earned the “Design Mind”
Smithsonian Institution’s National Design Award in October 2006, and in 2007, she was named one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries by Time magazine.

A Contributing Editor for Domus magazine (1987-91) and an editor of Abitare (1992-94), Paola
Antonelli is also the author of many exhibition catalogues, including the forthcoming Design
and the Elastic Mind (2008); Objects of Design (2003), a book dedicated to design objects in
the Museum’s collection; and the publication Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design (2005), which highlights how good design facilitates and enriches our daily life.

Paola Antonelli’s goal is to insistently promote design’s understanding, until its positive
influence on the world is fully acknowledged and exploited. She is currently working on several
shows on contemporary design; on Design Bites, a book about foods from all over the world
appreciated as examples of outstanding design; and on trying to get a Boeing 747 into the
collection of The Museum of Modern Art.