Marina Isgro, Curator, Media and Performance Art

Marina Isgro is the curator responsible for the Museum’s collection of media and performance art. She joined the Hirshhorn as Associate Curator in 2020.

Isgro is the curator of OSGEMEOS: Endless Story (2024–ongoing), the artists’ largest US museum exhibition, and editor of the accompanying monograph of the same name, published by the Hirshhorn and Rizzoli. She is also curator, with Betsy Johnson, of Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960 (2024–ongoing). She previously curated Laurie Anderson: The Weather (2021–2022), the artist’s largest US museum exhibition to date, and John Akomfrah: Purple (2022–2023). In 2023, she brought choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s dance HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the Bees? to the Museum. During the pandemic closure, she organized the online video series In the Beginning: Media Art and History (2020) and Lost in Place: Voyages in Video (2021) and co-curated the pan-Smithsonian series Viewfinder: Women’s Film and Video from Smithsonian Collections (2021). She is currently managing two large-scale commissions for the Hirshhorn’s Sculpture Garden.

Isgro has brought video and multimedia works by artists Peggy Ahwesh, John Akomfrah, Laurie Anderson, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Steffani Jemison, Guadalupe Maravilla, Christian Marclay, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Sondra Perry, Liliana Porter, Tomás Saraceno, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca into the Museum collection.

Prior to joining the Hirshhorn, Isgro served as Nam June Paik Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated Nam June Paik: Screen Play (2018). She previously held fellowships and internships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum.

Isgro presents her work on time-based media widely, with recent talks at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York; the College Art Association’s annual conference; the MIT List; and the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, among other institutions. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Art Journal and Tate Papers. She earned her MA and PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania, spending a year as a Fulbright scholar in Milan, and her BA from Princeton University.

Photo credit: Sarah Marcella Creative.