Associate Curator, Architecture and Urban Studies
Curator, BMW Guggenheim Lab

Guggenheim curator since 2008

David van der Leer joined the Guggenheim in October 2008. Together with Maria Nicanor, Van der Leer first developed and now heads the curatorial team of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile laboratory traveling to nine major cities worldwide over six years. Led by international, interdisciplinary teams of emerging talents, the Lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. The first Lab was open in New York in the summer and fall of 2011; in Berlin in the summer of 2012; and is now open in Mumbai through January 20, 2013.

In addition, Van der Leer curated stillspotting nyc, a two-year multidisciplinary project that took the Guggenheim’s Architecture and Urban Studies programming out into the streets of the New York City's five boroughs. Every three to five months, “stillspots” were identified, created, or transformed by architects, artists, designers, composers, and philosophers into public tours, events, or installations. The fifth and most recent stillspotting nyc edition, Audiogram by Improv Everywhere and audiologist Tina Jupiter, took place in the Bronx in 2012.

Van der Leer was one of the three curators for Spontaneous Interventions at the American Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, and for the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture of 2011, he was curator of the exhibition And Then It Became a City: Six Cities Under 60.

Van der Leer first worked on the exhibitions Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward and, with Nancy Spector, Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum. In May 2011, his Intervals exhibition with the San Francisco–based collective Futurefarmers opened to the public at the museum and around New York City. Van der Leer has lectured internationally on architecture and cities and is a regular contributor to publications such as Domus, Mark, The Architect's Newspaper, Azure, and PIN-UP. Prior to the Guggenheim, Van der Leer held editorial and curatorial positions at 010 Publishers in Rotterdam; the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), in Rotterdam; and Steven Holl Architects in New York. He received his master's with a focus on urban and architectural theory from the Department of Art and Cultural Sciences at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.