Manuel J. Borja-Villel

Curriculum Vitae

Manuel J. Borja-Villel (Burriana, 1957) received his degree in the History of Art from the Faculty of Geography and History of the Universitat de València in 1980. From 1981-1983 he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, during which he spent the Academic year 1981-1982 at Yale University. From 1988-1989 he received a Kress Foundation Fellowship for the History of Art. In 1989 he was granted a Ph.D. in the History of Art at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

Manuel J. Borja-Villel was director of the museum of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona from its inauguration in June 1990 until July 1998. While at the Tàpies Foundation, he organized such exhibitions as Els límits del museu (The limits of the museum) and La ciutat de la gent (The people’s city), in addition to shows devoted to the artists Louise Bourgeois, Brassaï, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others. He has written important commentary on Rodchenko, abstract expressionism, Bourgeois, Brassaï, Giacometti and contemporary Spanish art.

From July 1998 until January 2008, Manuel was director of the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Among the exhibitions he programmed at the MACBA were shows dedicated to Vito Acconci, El Lissitzky, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Robert Frank, David Goldblatt, Luís Gordillo, Raymond Hains, Richard Hamilton, William Kentridge, Perejaume, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler and Antoni Tàpies, among others. Some of the key expositions he curated at the museum were: “Antagonisms (art and politics)”, “Force Fields, Phases of the kinetic”, “Art and Utopia, Limited action” and “Theatre without Theatre”.

Since January 2008 he is the Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
   
He is also the President of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Modern Art Collections, linked to ICOM), and a member of several other international organisations, the American Center Foundation. Manuel Borja-Villel was also a member of the Consulting Committee of Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany.