Inés Katzenstein
Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute
Inés Katzenstein joined The Museum of Modern Art in 2018 as Curator of Latin American Art and the inaugural Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America. In her role as curator, she helps conceive the Museum’s collection displays and heads the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, which is dedicated to acquisitions from the region. She has organized two major exhibitions based on the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift: Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction (2019, with Maria Amalia García) and Chosen Memories (2023). In 2021 she was part of the curatorial team for Greater New York at MoMA PS1. Later she organized Carolina Caycedo’s Spiral for Shared Dreams in MoMA’s Marron Family Atrium (2023), Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace) in MoMA’s Kravis Studio, and Teresa Margolles, At the Scene at MoMA PS1 (2026, with Ana Janevski).
As director of the Cisneros Institute, she oversees research projects on modern and contemporary Latin American art and a fellowship program. Since its inauguration, the Cisneros Institute has developed a multiyear research project on issues of art and ecology in contemporary Latin America, which led to the publication of Momentum: Art & Ecology in Contemporary Latin America (2025), a book that was awarded the 2025 PROSE Award for Art History and Criticism and was later published in Spanish in collaboration with Caja Negra, Buenos Aires. Currently, the Institute is working on a publication about a second research project, Bridging the Sacred.
Prior to joining the Museum, from 2008 to 2018, she was the founding director of the art department at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, where she created and oversaw an educational program for artists and curators, and an exhibition program. Previously, she was Curator at Malba-Fundación Costantini and the editor of Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, published by MoMA in 2004. She holds a master’s degree from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and a BA from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.