Whitney Taps Meg Onli and Zack Winokur to Curate 2028 Biennial

The Whitney Museum has named the curators for its next Biennial. Whitney curator Meg Onli and director Zack Winokur will lead the 83rd edition, which is scheduled to open in March 2028.

The appointment places a returning institutional figure alongside a programmer whose background sits largely outside the museum walls. Onli co-curated the 2024 Biennial, titled "Even Better Than the Real Thing," with Chrissie Iles. She joined the Whitney as a curator-at-large in 2023 and was promoted to the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator title in 2024. Before the Whitney, she was codirector and curator of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles and an associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

A Cross-Disciplinary Pairing

Winokur is a cofounder of AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), which staged a five-week festival at Lincoln Center in 2025 featuring 12 new productions. His directing credits include "Complications in Sue" and "The Black Clown" at Opera Philadelphia, and "Both Ends," starring Justin Vivian Bond, made to celebrate a partnership with A24 and Dior. He has also collaborated on an installation for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Triennial with artists Hugh Hayden and Davóne Tines, and is the former artistic director of Little Island.

The announcement frames the pairing around breadth rather than a single discipline. A press release described the two as bringing "expansive perspectives on artistic practice today and a shared commitment to championing artists, fostering experimentation, and exploring new possibilities across disciplines."

The 2028 Biennial will be Onli's second turn as curator and Winokur's first, pairing a museum insider with an opera and theater programmer.

Onli's recent museum work may offer a signal of method. With artist Alex Da Corte, she is co-curating the Whitney's current retrospective of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, which opened last month. In a review, ARTnews deputy editor Alex Greenberger called it a "stylish show" that contends Lichtenstein "saw our pictures-obsessed moment coming … and even deliberately fed into it."

A Biennial With Reach

The timing lands the new team on a franchise with measurable draw. The 2026 Whitney Biennial, curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, closed less than a month ago and saw more than 550,000 visitors. That edition included a commissioned performance, "Marina," staged by Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez at Little Island this past August.

In statements carried in the announcement, Onli pointed to the Biennial's history of reinvention, citing the Whitney's early Annuals and later iterations as material "already giving us much to think about." Winokur described a shared interest in centering "objects and people and the collision between them." Whitney director Scott Rothkopf characterized Onli as one of the most compelling curatorial voices working today and Winokur as an inventive artistic programmer, calling their partnership a promise of "a radical new vision" for 2028.