Viktor Misiano was born in Moscow in 1957. From 1980 to 1990, he worked as a contemporary art curator at the Pushkin National Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. From 1992 to 1997, he headed the Center for Contemporary Art (CAC) in Moscow. He curated the Russian participation in the Istanbul Biennale (1992), the Venice Biennale (1995, 2003), the Valencia Biennale (2001) and the São Paulo Biennale (2002, 2004). In 1996, he was part of the curatorial team for the Manifesta I in Rotterdam. In 1993, he founded the Moscow Art Magazine (Moscow) and has been its editor-in-chief ever since. In 2003, he also founded the Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship (Amsterdam) and has been its editor since 2011. In 2005, he curated the first Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2007, he implemented a large scale exhibition project, “Progressive Nostalgia: Art from the Former USSR”, in the Centro per l’arte contemporanea, Prato (Italy), the Benaki Museum, Athens, KUMU, Tallinn, and KIASMA, Helsinki. His most recent curatorial project is a large-scale multidisciplinary initiative, “The Human Condition”, supported by the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. He is the author of many articles, catalogs and books, most notably: “’Other’ and Divers” (NLO, Moscow, 2004), “Five Lectures on Curatorship” (AdMarginem Publishing, Moscow, 2014), and “Curator Without a System. Viktor Misiano: Selected Writings » (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2022). From 2010 to 2014, he was the Chairman of the International Foundation Manifesta. He has an honorary doctorate from the Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture (Helsinki). He lives between Moscow (Russia) and Cisternino (Italy).
