Olga Kopenkina is a Belarus-born independent curator and art critic based in New York City.
Education: M.A. in Russian and Slavic Philology from the State Belarusian University (1990); M.A. in curating from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY, 1999-2001.
Curating (for details, go to Curatorial):
Exhibitions:
Cancel This Show! co-curated with Gregory Sholette, at Clemente Center (in conjunction with Fall of Freedom), 2025.
A Life Worth Surviving for: Works of Oliver Ressler at James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, 2024.
The Work of Love, the Queer of Labor at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 2022. This is the iteration of the exhibition, co-curated with Yevgeniy Fiks for Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, in 2017).
Feminism is Politics! at Pratt Manhattan Gallery. New York, 2016
Lenin: icebreaker Revisited at Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, 2015.
Sound of Silence: Art during Dictatorship at EFA Project Space, NY.
Properly Past, at BRIC Rotunda gallery, Emerging Curator Program, 2008.
Russia: Significant Other at Anna Akhmatova Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, 2006
Post-Diasporas: Voyages and Missions at the First Moscow Biennale, 2005.
Film programs:
“Emergency Turned Upside Down,” films by Oliver Ressler, 2017; “Becoming Zoya” by Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (aka Gluklya), 2016, for UnionDocs, Brooklyn.
Feminism is Politics! for Beursschouwburg (Brussels, Belgium, 2013);
Terror Tactics at gallery apex art (New York, 2007);
It’s not paranoia when they are really after you, at the National Institute of Contemporary art, Pro Arte gallery (St. Petersburg, Russia, 2003).
Writing: Olga Kopenkina wrote extensively on contemporary art issues, focusing on Eastern European art in a broader context of political histories. Kopenkina’s publications regularly appeared in Moscow Art Journal (in Russian and English). Her publication “Solitude of Collectivism,” a discussion with Martha Rosler, Pablo Helguera and Yevgeniy Fiks, commissioned by Moscow Art Journal, was published by Documenta 12 Magazines project (2007). Kopenkina has written reviews for Art Journal, Field Journal, Hyperallergic, ArtMargins, Rethinking Marxism, Manifesta Journal, Modern Painters, Afterimage, and others. She is an author of catalog essays for “Feminism is Politics!”, “The Work of Love, the Queer of Labor,” “Lenin: Icebreaker Revisited” and others.
Kopenkina is a contributor to the online project Parallel Chronologies, An Archive of Eastern European Exhibitions.
Employment: From 1990 to 1998, Kopenkina worked as a museum educator and lecturer at the National Museum of Find Arts of Republic of Belarus, Minsk. Simultaneously, she served as a curator at the gallery 6th Line, Minsk. Current: Adjunct professor at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, Steinhardt.