Guggenheim curator since 1989
Nancy Spector received her M.Phil. in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where she has organized exhibitions on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, conceptual photography, Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle, Richard Prince, Louise Bourgeois, Tino Sehgal, and Maurizio Cattelan. She co-organized Moving Pictures and Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated). She also organized the group exhibition theanyspacewhatever, which focused on the art of the 1990s.
She was one of the curators of Monument to Now, an exhibition of the Dakis Joannou Collection, which premiered in Athens as part of the Olympics program.
Spector was Adjunct Curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and co-organizer of the first Berlin Biennial in 1998. In 2007 she was the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale, where she presented an exhibition of work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Under the auspices of the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, she has initiated special commissions by Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lawrence Weiner, and Gabriel Orozco, as well as a special exhibition on the work of Joseph Beuys and Matthew Barney.
Spector has also contributed to numerous books on contemporary visual culture with essays on artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Douglas Gordon, Tino Sehgal, and Anna Gaskell.
Spector is a recipient of the Peter Norton Family Foundation Curators Award.