Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (born December 2, 1957, in Ridgewood, New Jersey, US) is an American writer, art historian and curator. She was the Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) which opened in Kassel on June 9, 2012. Previously, she was the director of the Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Torino at Castello di Rivoli in Turin until 2009, and chief curator of the same museum from 2002 to 2008. In October 2012 ArtReview magazine named her number one in their annual Power 100 list of the most influential figures in contemporary art. She is of Bulgarian-Italian descent. She is married to the Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti and has two daughters.

Her mother was from Piedmont, Italy and her parents studied in Turin together in the mid-1950s. Her father had fled from Bulgaria after World War II and was a medical student in Turin; her mother studied Philosophy in Turin and later got a PhD in archeology. Her parents migrated to the United States in the late 1950s, where she was born.

She grew up partly in Washington DC. A dual American-Italian citizen, she returned to Europe after completing her Baccalaureate at a French lycée in Washington, and studied literature, philology, language, and art history at the University of Pisa, Italy. In 1981, she graduated summa cum laude presenting a thesis on the relationship between American painting and poetry of the 1950s—specifically on Frank O'Hara and his relations with the art of Abstract Expressionism.

After graduation, she moved to Rome and began to write as an art critic for daily newspapers, including Reporter and Il Sole 24 Ore. Her reporting centered on early 20th century avant-garde and contemporary art. In 1999, she published a book about the Italian Arte Povera movement with Phaidon Press, London. She wrote the first monographs on the work of South African artist William Kentridge in 1996/97 (Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts) and on Canadian artist Janet Cardiff in 2001 (New York, PS1 Contemporary Art Center).

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