Since being appointed the Susan Sollins Executive Director and Chief Curator of Art21 in 2016, Tina Kukielski has spearheaded the strategic expansion of the organization’s mission, curatorial vision, and program.

Prior to Art21, Kukielski worked for over 13 years as a curator of contemporary art. She was co-curator of the 2013 Carnegie International, organizing a global exhibition of 35 artists from 19 countries and was lead curator of the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art from 2013-2015, launching a range of experimental digital projects and short films. Kukielski served as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2002–2010, where she helped organize exhibitions and acquisitions for leading contemporary artists.

An active voice in the field, Kukielski has delivered talks and participated in panels across the globe, including in Beirut, Chicago, Dubai, Miami, and Prague, as well as at Art Basel Miami and Frieze. She has contributed essays and reviews to arts publications as well as the anthology Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (2015). Recent essays include the foreword to Artists & the Unknown (Art21, 2025) and the introduction to Being an Artist: Art21 Interviews with Artists (Art21, 2018).

Kukielski has been a visiting critic at Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon, and has taught at the MFA programs at Parsons School of Design and the University of Hartford. She received her B.A. in Art History from Boston University and pursued graduate coursework in modern and contemporary art at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.