Brazilians Amanda Carneiro and Raphael Fonseca will curate the 2027 Bienal de São Paulo.
Carneiro was born and currently lives in São Paulo and has been a curator at MASP since 2018. Among her recent exhibitions at MASP are solos for Santiago Yahuarcani, Hulda Guzmán, Serigrafistas Queer, Kang Seung Lee, Beatriz Milhazes, Leonor Antunes and Sonia Gomes. Carneiro has coorganized exhibitions of artists previously neglected from the canon, including Abdias Nascimento, Madalena Santos Reinbolt and Conceição dos Bugres. Carneiro was also part of the curatorial team of MASP director Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Venice Biennale.
Fonseca was recently appointed visual arts programmer at Culturgest in Lisbon and Porto and is curator-at-large at Denver Art Museum, where he has served as curator and head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art. He is currently curating the Taiwan Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale and is cocurator of the 3rd Counterpublic Triennial, to be held in St. Louis, USA, later this year. In 2027 he will direct the Sequences festival in Reykjavik, alongside Yina Jiménez Suriel. In 2025 he curated the Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre.
Both curators remarked on the profound effect visiting previous editions of the Bienal had on them. Carneiro describes being ‘deeply marked by the artistic practices, debates, and encounters that the São Paulo Biennial makes possible’, while Fonseca recalled that the first time he travelled from his city of birth, Rio De Janeiro, to São Paulo, was to see the 2006 exhibition. ‘To be in the position of chief curator twenty years after that first encounter with the biennial format is something that surpasses all my expectations and leaves me, frankly, speechless.’
