Meghana Karnik

Meghana Karnik (1989, United States) works across modalities as a curator, arts administrator, and writer; exploring paradoxes between art and social change, belief and technology, lived experience and institutional process. For Meghana, curating is shaped by relationships—to people, infrastructures, and resources. She has been researching, “How do we relate in a culture without fact, but only of wordplay?” through Process-As-Practice at The Luminary (St. Louis). At de Appel, she seeks to learn from colleagues building support structures and autonomy into the process of making art public.

Meghana’s recent curatorial projects include Tamar Ettun: How To Trap A Demon (2022), presenting the artist’s research into somatic empathy, talismanic objects, and astrology as storytelling; and TITLE TBD (2020), a group exhibition which viewed failure as a seed to reimagine artistic communities, emphasizing peer support and the solidarity economy.

From 2021-2022, Meghana was Manager, Grants & Artist Initiatives at Art Matters Foundation (New York) supporting Artist2Artist, a grant program that shifts philanthropic power to artists. From 2019-2020, she was Associate Curator for FRONT International 2022 (Cleveland). From 2015-2019, she was Program Manager and later, Associate Director of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space (New York), a curatorial incubator presenting exhibitions and SHIFT: A Residency for Arts Workers.

Meghana’s participation in the Curatorial Programme is made possible through an NAF Cultural Grant from The Netherland-America Foundation.