Ilaria Bonacossa is the new director of Genoa's Palazzo Ducale

Ilaria Bonacossa is the new director of Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale. This was decided this morning by the Foundation’s board of directors chaired by Beppe Costa, flanked by vice-chair Francesco Berti Riboli, and composed of board members Franco Bampi, Federica Messina and Mitchell Wolfson. The newly appointed director thus succeeds Serena Bertolucci.

“A dutifully thorough and lengthy process leading to the selection of the new director has been concluded. Palazzo Ducale is an institution of undisputed prestige - proof of this is the large number of applications that were received - and in the evaluation we were guided by this awareness and the desire to maintain the high quality level of our cultural production,” said Palazzo Ducale Culture Foundation President Beppe Costa. “A level that outgoing director Serena Bertolucci, whom I thank, was able to ensure in the activities that the Ducal Palace organized. I am sure that Dr. Ilaria Bonacossa, in addition to continuing on the path traced in years of the Palace’s history, will be able to take us a further leap forward in terms of innovation, involvement of the territory and centrality within the national and international scene. The new director will be able to count on a reliable machine composed of people who work every day in a passionate, professional and valuable way. To her goes my personal best wishes, those of the Board of Directors, Board participants and founding members.”

“A warm welcome to Ilaria Bonacossa, the new director of Palazzo Ducale chosen by the president and the board of directors,” commented Genoa Mayor Marco Bucci on the appointment. “I am sure that she will be able to carry out her task to the best of her ability and face the new challenges that await us to grow Genoa’s cultural offerings. He is a high-profile and competent figure who has already had the opportunity in the past to engage with Genoa’s cultural world and who today takes up a new and crucial mission for our city. Palazzo Ducale in recent years has brought to Genoa numerous projects, exhibitions and initiatives of which we are extremely proud and which have allowed us to greatly expand our cultural offerings, recording hundreds of thousands of visits. We want to continue on this path, consecrating our city as a point of reference for culture in Italy. Together with Ilaria Bonacossa we are ready to put in place strategies and initiatives to attract more and more visitors from all over the world, raising the cultural level of the city. From today begins a new path for Palazzo Ducale, we look to the future to make our Genoa grow.”

Ilaria Bonacossa, from Milan, born in 1973, is a contemporary art historian; after classical studies at the Liceo Tito Livio in Milan, she graduated in contemporary art history at the Statale di Milano with a thesis on Italian painters in the Goupil archives in Bordeaux, and then attended from 1998 to 2002 the School of Specialization in Art History also at the Statale di Milano. For her also a Master’s degree in Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art at Bard College in New York, obtained with highest honors.

Precisely at Bard College, Bonacossa curated her first exhibition, Leggerezza. An alternative History of Italian art, held in 2001. He has curated several exhibitions, including solo shows by Tomás Saraceno, Marzia Migliora, Flavio Favelli, Kees Goudswaard, Ian Kiaer and many others. She has worked at a variety of institutions: after internships at Christie’s and the Guggenheim in New York, she was at the Luhring Augustine gallery in London for two years and then became assistant curator at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, of which she later became curator and coordinator in 2005. She has since collaborated in the organization of numerous international events. After her experience in Turin, she was Artistic Director of the Villa Croce Museum in Genoa from 2012 to 2017 and has been curator of the permanent contemporary art installations of Antinori Art Projects since 2014. In 2013 she curated the Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and even before that, in 2007, she was a member for the Jury for the Golden Lion. She was also a member of the technical committee for acquisitions of FRAC Provence-Alpes Côte d’Azur in Marseille, a member of the steering committee of PAC in Milan, and director of the international Artist’s Pension Trust program. In 2017 she was appointed as director of Artissima, which she led until 2021, and in January 2022 she was appointed director of the National Museum of Digital Art.

Pictured: Ilaria Bonacossa. Photo by Giorgio Perottino

Ilaria Bonacossa is the new director of Genoa's Palazzo Ducale

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