Mari Spirito

Mari Spirito is the executive director and curator of Protocinema, an international nonprofit arts organization that collaborates with artists and institutions to create works exploring shared human experiences. With a presence in both the US and Turkey since 2011, Protocinema fosters nuanced artistic practice through commissions, exhibitions, public programs, the Protocinema Emerging Curator Series (PECS) mentorship program, and the Protozine publication of exhibition texts.

In addition to her work with Protocinema and teaching in RISD’s Sculpture department, she taught at the Massachusetts College of Art (2024) and was a visiting curator for the MFA Visual Art program at the Vermont College of Art (2023–24). Since 2020, she has been a regular speaker for Açık Diyalog İstanbul, the Curating Contemporary Art Seminar Program in Turkey.

Spirito curated I’m Glad You Exist, a screening of videos by Coleman Collins, Onur Karaoğlu, Laura Parnes, and Diane Severin Nguyen at the Ekrani i Artit Festival, Shkodër, Albania in 2025. She also curated The Substance with Which the Future Is Made, the inaugural video art program at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (2024–25), displayed outdoors in The Yard. In 2023, she curated Art, Ancestors, Ghosts & the Dead, a convening on attitudes toward death across cultures, and The Myth of Normal, A Celebration of Authentic Expression, a group exhibition at MassArt Art Museum, Boston. Spirito also completed the Contemplative Care Foundations Program at the New York Zen Center in 2023.

Spirito developed and presented a new exhibition model, A Few in Many Places, a multi-city group exhibition installed in Beirut, Istanbul, Berlin, Montreal, and Philadelphia in 2020. This model keeps a presence in each community while utilizing digital support structures to maintain both local engagement and global interconnectedness. In 2021, the exhibition expanded to Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, Santurce, and Guatemala City.

From 2013–18, Spirito programmed the Conversations series for both Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. She served as an international advisory committee member for the inaugural High Line Plinth Commissions in New York (2017), curator/director of Alt Art Space in Bomonti, Istanbul (2015–17), advisor to the second Mardin Biennial in Turkey (2012), and director of 303 Gallery in New York (2000–12). Spirito is currently vice president of the Board of Trustees at Participant, Inc. and serves on the Board of Directors for ArteEast, both in New York, as well as on the Advisory Committee for the Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery at York University in Toronto.