Whitney Names Meg Onli and Zack Winokur for 2028 Biennial

By Elena Vasquez

Who will curate the 2028 Whitney Biennial?

The Whitney Museum of American Art named Meg Onli and Zack Winokur to curate its 83rd Biennial, opening in March 2028.

Onli, 42, has been at the Whitney since 2023. She organized the museum's 2024 Biennial with Chrissie Iles, a longtime Whitney curator. The 2028 appointment will be Winokur's first time curating a large-scale museum show.

The museum describes the Biennial as America's foremost showcase for emerging visual artists, focused on new currents in contemporary art practice. The announcement also frames the 2028 event as the much-scrutinized 83rd edition of that series.

Winokur, 37, is a former dancer and the former artistic director of Little Island. He led the organization's performing arts program from 2024 until September of this year. The pairing joins a curator already embedded in the Whitney's exhibition history with a programming director whose previous curating experience comes from the performing arts.

Onli supplies continuity; Winokur supplies a new institutional perspective.

What does the 2028 edition change?

The curators said they do not know how many artists will appear, and no theme has emerged. The 2026 Biennial featured 56 individual artists and groups from around the world. That figure supplies the latest scale reference, but it is not a target or forecast for 2028.

The 83rd label counts editions, while the 2026 figure of 56 counts participating artists and groups together. For readers, those numbers measure sequence and roster scale, not the same thing.

Onli said the 2028 show will “probably be more experimental” than the 2024 edition she worked on. She cited interdisciplinary collaborations between the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the choreographer Martha Graham as one source of inspiration.

“We want to honor the tradition of what a Biennial is, but also be inventive and exciting,” Whitney director Scott Rothkopf said.

For potential artists and audiences, the unresolved roster makes the March 2028 exhibition unusually open in scale and unusually explicit about experimentation under Onli and Winokur.

The 2028 Biennial has a stated experimental impulse, but no settled theme or artist total.

Why did the Whitney choose Winokur?

Rothkopf said he selected Winokur, whom he acknowledged was an “unexpected” choice. His stated reasons were Winokur's talent for building audiences, his eclectic approach to programming and his deep connections to artists across disciplines.

The rationale rests on three priorities: audience building, eclectic programming and cross-disciplinary relationships with artists. Winokur's move from Little Island to the Whitney's Biennial will place those methods within a large-scale museum context for the first time.

The central test is whether his cross-disciplinary network can support Onli's experimental aim without losing the institutional tradition that Rothkopf says the museum wants to honor. That combination gives the 2028 edition a clear curatorial proposition, even though it leaves the number of participants, final theme and practical shape of the exhibition unresolved.

The March 2028 opening will show whether Onli's experimentation and Winokur's cross-disciplinary reach can make the 83rd Biennial distinct.