Art Taaalkssss: Beatrice Leanza

Beatrice Leanza is a cultural strategist, museum director, and critic with a background in Asian studies. She was based in Beijing for 17 years, where she co-founded The Global School, the first independent institute for interdisciplinary creative research in China, and served as Creative Director of Beijing Design Week. She has been Director of MAAT, Lisbon and MUDAC, Lausanne. She was Creative Director of Beijing Design Week and co-founded The Global School, the first independent institute for interdisciplinary creative research established in China. She curated The Um Slaim School – An Architecture of Connection, the Saudi Arabia Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, whose public programme engaged over 60 practitioners from the MENA region.

In her talk, Beatrice Leanza draws on her recent book The New Design Museum – Co-creating the Present, Prototyping the Future (2024) and her international experience to reflect on the role of cultural institutions as spaces of knowledge production. She explores how participatory and collaborative approaches can foster democratic practices of mutual care and shared purpose, and how institutions—across scales from the city to the exhibition—can act as agents of transformation.