Roxana Marcoci
Innovative curator of contemporary art and photography, Roxana Marcoci is currently the David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Born in Bucharest, Romania, Marcoci was immersed in the performing and visual arts as a child through her parents’ careers; her mother worked as an actress and her father was an architect. Marcoci left Bucharest as a political dissident when she was 18 years old and arrived in New York City via Paris.
She enrolled at Hunter College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983. In an interview about her time as a Hunter student, Marcoci said, “Among my first mentors was Craig Owens, who opened my views toward post-structuralism and gender studies, and the other was Maurice Berger, so I was interested early on in issues of race and class justice and the sociological underpinnings of photography.” Marcoci followed in her mentor’s footsteps and taught at Hunter as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 1994.
After receiving a PhD in art history, theory, and criticism from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Marcoci has held various curatorial positions and contributed essays and critical analyses to numerous publications and catalogs. Her writing and curatorial work has delved into the complexities of photography, addressing its relationship with other art forms and exploring its social and cultural implications. Marcoci is a visiting critic in the graduate program at Yale University and a contributor to Aperture, Art in America, Art Journal, and Mousse. She has published over 50 essays on modern and contemporary art and co-authored the three-volume Photography at MoMA (2015/17), and organized Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear (2022).
Marcoci has curated numerous exhibitions, including Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum (2022), Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW (2017), Zoe Leonard: Analogue (2015), From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (2015), Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness (2014), The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook (2012), Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2012), Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence (2011), Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 (2011), Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (2010), and The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (2010).