Biennale Architecture  Director 

Aaron Betsky 

Born in Missoula (Montana, USA) in 1958, he trained in the Netherlands and the United States. Aaron Betsky brings vast and varied experience as curator, manager, historian, critic and in creating architecture exhibitions to the Venice Biennale.
Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) of Rotterdam –one of the most important architecture museums and centres in the world– from 2001 to 2006, for three editions (2002, 2004, 2006) he held the post of Commissioner for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale’s International Architecture Exhibition.

At the 8th International Architecture Exhibition (2002), the Dutch Pavilion, curated by Aaron Betsky, won the Golden Lion for best foreign pavilion.

After finishing his secondary education in the Netherlands, Betsky graduated from the Yale School of Architecture (USA) and is accepted candidate for a Ph.D. in the History of Architecture from the Technical University in Delft (Netherlands).

He is currently Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (since 2006), one of the most important and oldest (125 years) in the United States. Before this, between 1995 and 2001, he was Curator for architecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Betsky is a prolific writer and journalist and the author of a dozen books starting with Violated Perfection: Architecture and the Fragmentation of the Modern (1990) and numerous articles with leading international specialised periodicals. He has written for the “Los Angeles Times” (1991-1994), and amongst the many other newspapers and periodicals he has contributed to, the “New York Times”, “Domus”, “Deutsche Bauzeitung, “Artforum” and “Metropolitan Home”.

He has held the Eero Saarinen chair in architecture at the University of Michigan and has been Visiting Professor at some leading US universities: at Columbia University in New York, at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, at the School of Architecture in Houston, and at the Southern California Institute of Santa Monica.

He is an honorary member of the British Institute of Architects (2004) and has won an award from the American Institute of Architects (2001).
From 1985 to 1987, he worked with Frank O. Gehry Associates, Inc. (Venice, California).
Among his books are What is Modernism (Phaidon Press, to be published in autumn 2008) and The United Nations Building (Thames & Hudson, 2006).