RADAR Curator
Isabella Lenzi (1986, São Paulo, Brazil)
Lives in Madrid.
She is currently Visual Arts Curator at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, as well as Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Alberto Cruz Foundation in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Until the end of 2023, she was a curator and researcher in the Collections Department of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, where she took part in the project to reorganize the museum’s permanent collection. Previously, she worked as Curator of Visual Arts at Fundación Mapfre in Madrid.
In Brazil, she directed for seven years the cultural center of the Instituto Camões / Consulate General of Portugal in São Paulo, which she consolidated as a place for debate and experimentation, with a program of exhibitions, film cycles, public programs, and the publication of artist books and catalogues. The aim was to work in a situated way—mapping, supporting, and disseminating Portuguese cultural production by emerging and historical artists and thinkers—through a dialogue with the Brazilian and local context, adopting an approach that revisits the shared colonial past and present of both countries.
Since 2016, she has lived between Latin America and Europe. In Latin America, she was also part of the curatorial, public programs, and residency team at Videobrasil, a cultural association dedicated to mapping and disseminating art from the geopolitical South. She worked on the programming and coordination of two editions of the SESC_Videobrasil International Festival (now the SESC_Videobrasil Biennial). Previously, she worked in curatorial and exhibition coordination at Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo, and served as assistant curator of the 11th Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador.
In the United Kingdom, she worked in the curatorial department of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where she coordinated the Neon Curatorial Exchange residency program between London and Athens, as well as exhibitions for the Exhibitions Archive Department. She has also collaborated on several European projects at institutions such as the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan.
As an independent curator, she has curated projects at various Spanish institutions such as the Museo Reina Sofía, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona, the Círculo de Bellas Artes, La Casa Encendida, and the Sala de Arte Joven of the Community of Madrid, with a special focus on establishing spaces for dialogue and co-creation with the local fabric through transversal, collective, and collaborative proposals. She is currently preparing curatorial projects for the Centre del Carme de Cultura Contemporània in Valencia and MUCAC – Museo Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga.
She is an architect and urban planner trained at the Universidade de São Paulo and the Universidade do Porto (Portugal), with a specialization in Art History. She holds a Master’s in Photography and Visual Culture from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, a Master’s in Museum Studies from University College London (UCL), and an MRes in Museology from the Universidade de São Paulo.