Ingrid Schaffner is an American curator and writer, whose work coalesces around themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms. As curator of the 2018 Carnegie International, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Schaffner presented major installations by artists and collectives, including El Anatsui, Alex Da Corte, Zoe Leonard, Postcommodity, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, along with “Dig Where You Stand,” a new look at the museum’s permanent collections by Koyo Kouoh, all within an overarching ethos of “Museum Joy.”

From 2000 through 2015, Schaffner directed the exhibition program as chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania, where she increased the rigor, diversity, and popular appeal of its program. She facilitated artists as curators, with exhibitions by Kara Walker, Virgil Marti, and Christian Marclay and brought attention to under-recognized artists, little-explored themes, and emerging practices within contemporary art. Her ICA exhibitions include: Barry LeVa, Accumulated Vision; Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay; Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry; Queer Voice; and Jason Rhoades, Four Roads.

Schaffner’s work has been recognized with awards from the International Art Critics Association (AICA) and grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Schaffner attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and holds a master’s degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Her belief that writing about art should be lively and engaging as well as acutely researched informs her many publications, including: Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art (Prestel) and Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (MIT Press). She is co-authoring a history of Skowhegan, the summer art program in Maine, founded by artists for artists in 1946.

--Bio courtesy of the Chinati Foundation