Heidi Zuckerman
Heidi Zuckerman is CEO and Director of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) and a globally recognized leader in contemporary art.
She is host of the podcast About Art and author of the Conversation with Artists book series.
Appointed in January 2021, Zuckerman led the museum in opening its new home in
October 2022 designed by Morphosis Architects under the direction of Pritzker Prize
winner Thom Mayne. The state-of-the-art 53,000 square foot building is double the size
of the museum’s former location in Newport Beach. In a salute to OCMA’s thirteen
female founders, the opening collection exhibition will be 13 Women, organized
by Zuckerman. This is the second building project she has completed. Since arriving,
she has raised more than $50 million, and under her leadership, the museum welcomed
a quarter of a million visitors to the museum in the first 11 months of operation, more
than 12x previous annual attendance at the Newport Beach location.Zuckerman is the former 14-year CEO and Director of the Aspen Art Museum. After
reimagining the museum as a world-class institution, she founded its annual ArtCrush
gala, raised more than $130 million and built a new, highly acclaimed museum with
Shigeru Ban, the 2014 Pritzker Prize winner for architecture. At the Aspen Art
Museum, Heidi Zuckerman curated the exhibitions Wade Guyton Peter Fischli David
Weiss (2017), Yves Klein David Hammons/David Hammons Yves Klein (2014), Lorna
Simpson: Works on Paper (2013), Mark Grotjahn (2012) and Fred Tomaselli (2009).
From 1999 to 2005 she was the Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator at the University of
California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she curated more than
forty solo exhibitions of international contemporary artists such as Peter Doig, Shirin
Neshat, Teresita Fernández, Julie Mehretu, Doug Aitken, Cai Guo-Qiang, Tacita Dean,
Wolfgang Laib, Ernesto Neto, Simryn Gill, Sanford Biggers, Ricky Swallow and Tobias
Rehberger. Formerly she was the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Art at The Jewish
Museum, New York, appointed in 1993, and curated Light x Eight: The Hanukkah
Project, Contemporary Artist Project: Kristin Oppenheim and Louis I. Kahn Drawings:
Synagogue Projects which traveled to The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
Appointed in January 2021, Zuckerman led the museum in opening its new home in
October 2022 designed by Morphosis Architects under the direction of Pritzker Prize
winner Thom Mayne. The state-of-the-art 53,000 square foot building is double the size
of the museum’s former location in Newport Beach. In a salute to OCMA’s thirteen
female founders, the opening collection exhibition will be 13 Women, organized
by Zuckerman. This is the second building project she has completed. Since arriving,
she has raised more than $50 million, and under her leadership, the museum welcomed
a quarter of a million visitors to the museum in the first 11 months of operation, more
than 12x previous annual attendance at the Newport Beach location.Zuckerman is the former 14-year CEO and Director of the Aspen Art Museum. After
reimagining the museum as a world-class institution, she founded its annual ArtCrush
gala, raised more than $130 million and built a new, highly acclaimed museum with
Shigeru Ban, the 2014 Pritzker Prize winner for architecture. At the Aspen Art
Museum, Heidi Zuckerman curated the exhibitions Wade Guyton Peter Fischli David
Weiss (2017), Yves Klein David Hammons/David Hammons Yves Klein (2014), Lorna
Simpson: Works on Paper (2013), Mark Grotjahn (2012) and Fred Tomaselli (2009).
From 1999 to 2005 she was the Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator at the University of
California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she curated more than
forty solo exhibitions of international contemporary artists such as Peter Doig, Shirin
Neshat, Teresita Fernández, Julie Mehretu, Doug Aitken, Cai Guo-Qiang, Tacita Dean,
Wolfgang Laib, Ernesto Neto, Simryn Gill, Sanford Biggers, Ricky Swallow and Tobias
Rehberger. Formerly she was the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Art at The Jewish
Museum, New York, appointed in 1993, and curated Light x Eight: The Hanukkah
Project, Contemporary Artist Project: Kristin Oppenheim and Louis I. Kahn Drawings:
Synagogue Projects which traveled to The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
She has curated more than 200 museum exhibitions during her career and is the author
of numerous books including a widely loved children’s book The Rainbow Hour with
artist Amy Adler. She was recently appointed to be an Arts Commissioner for the City of
Costa Mesa. Zuckerman earned a BA in European History from the University of Pennsylvania, an
MA in Art History from Hunter College at CUNY and holds a Harvard Business School
Executive Education certification.
FSA features Heidi Zuckerman’s Conversations About Art episode with Executive Director Tyler Rollins under Programs.