Rachel Steinberg

Rachel Vera Steinberg is a curator based in New York City. Her work explores cultural mythmaking, the world-building methodologies found in science fiction, as well as political and historical distinctions between facts and fictions. Since the beginning of her career, she has focused primarily on the presentation of time-based media. Through her work in New York-based nonprofit institutions, she is committed to examining the roles of alternative art spaces and artistic agency. Her research on science fiction as an exhibition-making modality culminated in the group exhibition A faint hum at the Hessel Museum. 



She is the curator and director of exhibitions at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY, where she oversees the production of ambitiously scaled installations and exhibitions. She was the 2019–20 fellow at the Curatorial & Research Residency Program at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, Germany, where she curated the exhibition JSC ON VIEW: MYTHOLOGISTS (2021–22). She was the director of SOHO20 Artists Inc from 2015–18 and the assistant director of NURTUREart Non-Profit Inc from 2010–15, where she founded exhibition- and event-based programs promoting time-based media and gender equity. She is the co-founder of Custom Program (2017–19), a micro-gallery in Brooklyn focusing on humor, irreverence and site specificity. Exhibitions that she has curated have been written about in Hyperallergic, Artsy, KUBA Paris, Brooklyn Magazine, Art F City and more. As an independent curator, she has curated exhibitions locally and internationally and spoken at universities throughout the US. She has an MA from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.