Nato Thompson

Nato Thompson is a curator and author and works as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary. Philadelphia Contemporary is a mobile contemporary art organization in the process of creating a non-collecting museum in the city of Philadelphia. Before Philadelphia Contemporary, he worked at the New York-based public art organization Creative Time as Artistic Director which he joined in January 2007. Since then, Thompson has organized major Creative Time projects such as recently The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), among others. Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions, including The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004), with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. He has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life published in January 2017.