In December 2024, Naomi Beckwith was appointed Artistic Director of documenta 16 by the international selection committee. She now announces her core team: an ensemble of four accomplished thinkers and practitioners—Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng—who will work with her to develop the exhibition, publications, and public programming for documenta 16.

Naomi Beckwith: “I am grateful to walk with this team in crafting documenta 16. I admire their independence of spirit and thought which, for each, is fueled by their generosity to artists and audiences alike. We are all excited to traverse, together, myriad fields of current artistic practices and to be in dialogue with the immense issues shaping our planet’s manifold social and cultural landscapes and its futures.”

documenta 16 will take place from June 12 to September 19, 2027, in Kassel.

About the Team:

Carla Acevedo-Yates
A curator and researcher, Acevedo-Yates focuses on contemporary art of the Americas from a transcultural perspective, with a particular emphasis on the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. She has held curatorial positions at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she curated Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s – Today and entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico. Her recent work explores diaspora as a generative site of cultural production that reimagines social and political life.

Romi Crawford
An educator, writer, and professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Crawford engages in art historical research that is collaborative, dynamic, and often experimental. Her scholarship examines historical instances of collective art making and investigates how artistic techniques emerge from uneven social and economic conditions. She is the founder of the Black Arts Movement School Modality and the New Art School Modality—both free, mobile platforms grounded in alternative values for arts education.

Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro
A writer and editor, Rodríguez Castro’s publications center on the legacies of poets, philosophers, and underrecognized thinkers. Her works include Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984–1992 by Audre Lorde (2020), In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, writings by Joy James (2023), and the forthcoming Another Sun, a conversation with Françoise Vergès (2026). Her editorial practice is attentive to latent inscriptions across archives, verse, song, and terrain.

Xiaoyu Weng (pronounced sh-ih-ow-y-uu w-eh-ng)
A curator and writer, Weng’s practice emerges from close collaborations with artists and cultural workers across disciplines and geographies. Her work engages hybrid and syncretic frameworks to shape contemporary discourse. She has held curatorial roles at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Ural Industrial Biennial (Yekaterinburg), and Kadist Art Foundation (San Francisco and Paris), among others. Her approach emphasizes friendship, dialogue, and new constellations of connection.

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