Valéria Piccoli is the Ken and Linda Cutler Chair of the Arts of the Americas and curator of Latin American Art at Mia, having joined the museum in the fall of 2022. Born and raised in Brazil, she studied architecture at the University of São Paulo, where she also received her master’s degree and PhD in art history. Her academic work focused on the iconography produced by European traveler artists working in Latin America during the 16th to 19th centuries; her curatorial practice has expanded to exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.
She was assistant curator at the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo prior to joining the curatorial team at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, one of the largest museums in South America, in 2008. As chief curator beginning in 2012, she was instrumental in the reinstallation of the permanent collection and worked with artists such as Ernesto Neto and Rosana Paulino on survey exhibitions at the museum. She has collaborated on numerous international research and exhibition projects, among them “Terra Brasilis,” part of the Europalia Brésil festival (Brussels, 2011), and “Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic” in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, in Chicago (2015–2016). This exhibition won an award from the Association of Art Museum Curators.