The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has announced who will shape the next edition of its most closely watched exhibition. Meg Onli, the museum’s Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, and the director Zack Winokur will co-organise Whitney Biennial 2028, the 83rd edition of the series. The show is scheduled to open in March 2028.
A second Biennial for Onli
For Onli it is a return to familiar ground. She co-organised the 2024 edition, Even Better Than the Real Thing, and is currently co-curating Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, the first full-scale Lichtenstein retrospective in New York in more than three decades, on view at the Whitney through 10 May 2027. Long before her museum career, she founded the Black Visual Archive in 2010, a project reviewing contemporary Black visual culture, which brought her an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital. She has also received a Graham Foundation grant, the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award and the first Figure Skating Prize from Virgil Abloh’s Art Space.
A stage director in the curatorial chair
Winokur comes from the performing arts. He is co-founder and artistic director of AMOC*, the American Modern Opera Company, a collective of singers, dancers and instrumentalists that develops new work across disciplines, and he previously served as artistic director of Little Island, the park and performance venue on the Hudson. In 2025 AMOC* staged a five-week festival across the Lincoln Center campus with twelve new productions.
What the pairing suggests
Putting a museum curator and an opera and theatre director side by side signals a Biennial that may treat performance, music and live collaboration as core material rather than side programming. The Whitney describes the duo as sharing a commitment to championing artists and encouraging experimentation across forms. The Biennial has always been read as a temperature check on American art; a team with one foot in the gallery and one on the stage suggests that the 2028 reading may be taken in several media at once.
Artist lists and a title will follow later. For now, the announcement gives New York’s art scene a clear sense of direction more than a year before the first works are installed.