Manylumens
A headshot photo of Meg Onli. They have a light skin-tone. The sides of their head are shaven and they have long locs tied up into a bun. They are wearing a mutli-patterned button down shirt.

Season 3: Episode 4

Meg Onli

Meg Onli

MAY 10, 2023

Maori talks with LA-based curator and writer Meg Onli, whose work attends to the intricacies of race and the production of space. She is the co-curator of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, previously served as the director and curator of the now-shuttered The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, and was prior to that the Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Meg tells Maori about growing up in LA, what exhibits transformed her, the curators that inspire her, and what pop culture she turns to at the end of a long day.
A headshot photo of Meg Onli. They have a light skin-tone. The sides of their head are shaven and they have long locs tied up into a bun. They are wearing a mutli-patterned button down shirt.

Meg Onli is a curator and writer whose work attends to the intricacies of race and the production of space. Currently, she is the co-curator of the forthcoming 2024 Whitney Biennial with Chrissie Iles. Previously Onli was appointed the director and curator of Los Angeles’s Underground Museum and the Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Onli has curated the exhibitions Speech/Acts (2017), Colored People Time (2019), Jessica Vaughn: Our Primary Focus is to be Successful (2021), and recently curated the retrospective Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021) with Erin Christovale. Onli is the recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; a 2014 Graham Foundation Grant; a 2019 Transformation Award from the Leeway Foundation, was the inaugural recipient of the Figure Skating Award in 2021; and a former Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow. In the summer of 2020, Onli founded the initiative Art for Philadelphia, which raised over $100,000 for community-led abolitionist organizations.

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