Whitney names Onli and Winokur to lead its 2028 Biennial
· BehindLines newsroom
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has named the two people who will organize its next Biennial: curator Meg Onli and stage director and choreographer Zack Winokur. According to The Art Newspaper, the exhibition, the 83rd of its kind, is due to open in March 2028; the museum announced it in a statement dated November 6, 2026.
A duo from the museum and the stage
According to The Art Newspaper, Meg Onli joined the Whitney in 2023 as curator at large before becoming a curator in 2024. She co-curated the 2024 Biennial, titled "Even Better Than the Real Thing," with her colleague Chrissie Iles, as well as the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective now on view, which runs until May 10, 2027.
Zack Winokur works across dance, music, visual art, opera and theatre, the paper says. He co-founded the live performance collective AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), which took over the Lincoln Center campus for five weeks last year. He has also served as artistic director of Little Island, a cultural park near the museum, and has directed productions for Opera Philadelphia and Santa Fe Opera.
What the two have to say
The Whitney's director, Scott Rothkopf, sees in this partnership the promise of a "radical new vision," according to The Art Newspaper. He describes Meg Onli as one of the most compelling curatorial voices working today, able to champion artists, and Zack Winokur as an equally inventive artistic programmer who has become one of the leading voices of his generation. Meg Onli says she wants to explore what the Biennial can be and to see where her conversations with artists lead; Zack Winokur says he is mostly motivated by the idea of being in service to other artists.
Background: an institution and an event
The Whitney's press page recalls that the Biennial, founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, presents itself as the longest-running survey of American art. More than 3,600 artists have taken part. After early editions organized by medium, the museum held yearly exhibitions from 1937; the current format, a survey across all media every two years, dates from 1973.
According to the museum's figures cited by The Art Newspaper, the 2026 edition, organized by in-house curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, ended in October and drew more than 550,000 visitors, about 75% of them Millennials or Gen Z. The paper sees in this the youngest audience since the Whitney began tracking visitors' ages.
The documents consulted do not yet give the theme or the invited artists of the 2028 edition.