In a pivotal step toward shaping the vision of documenta 16, Artistic Director Naomi Beckwith has unveiled the core team of collaborators who will join her in curating the landmark exhibition. The group—Carla Acevedo-Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng—brings together an expansive range of expertise across curating, critical theory, publishing, and transnational art histories.

The announcement marks a key milestone in the lead-up to the next edition of documenta, which will run from June 12 to September 19, 2027, in Kassel, Germany. Known as one of the world’s most influential platforms for contemporary art, documenta has long served as a barometer for global cultural discourse.

“I am grateful to walk with this team in crafting documenta 16,” said Beckwith. “I admire their independence of spirit and thought which, for each, is fueled by their generosity to artists and audiences alike. We are all excited to traverse, together, myriad fields of current artistic practices and to be in dialogue with the immense issues shaping our planet’s manifold social and cultural landscapes and its futures.”

Each member of the newly announced ensemble brings a distinct voice and critical approach:

Naomi Beckwith is Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she oversees collections, exhibitions, publications, and strategic direction across its global network. Formerly at MCA Chicago and the Studio Museum in Harlem, she holds a degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Beckwith has (co-)organized major exhibitions including “Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen” and The “Freedom Principle”, and contributed to “Grief and Grievance” at the New Museum. Her exhibitions, lectures and publications focus on the impact and resonance of Black culture on multidisciplinary practices in global contemporary art. In 2024, she received the David C. Driskell Prize and is currently leading the curatorial team at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris for the fall 2025 exhibitions known as the “American Season”

Carla Acevedo-Yates is a curator and researcher working with contemporary art of the Americas from a transcultural perspective, with a particular focus on the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. She has held curatorial positions at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she curated the group exhibitions Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s – Today and entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico, among other projects. Her recent exhibitions, publications, and lectures have focused on diaspora as a site of cultural production that reimagines social and political life.

Romi Crawford is an educator, writer and professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is interested in knowledge production that emerges from art making and is committed to a method of art historical research that is responsive, collaborative, recuperative, dynamic and often experimental in form. Crawford’s scholarship and curatorial projects examine historical instances of collective art making and are themselves collaborative and intergenerational by design. She is routinely concerned with artistic techniques and strategies that emerge from uneven social and economic conditions, and how such circumstances embolden new genres, ways of making, and structures, including improvisational and para-institutional formats. Crawford’s research into pedagogical activities that embed in art practices of the 60s and 70s prompted her to establish the Black Arts Movement School Modality and the New Art School Modality. Both platforms are free, roving, and grounded in a revised set of values for arts education.

Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a writer and editor. Her titles include Dream of Europe: Selected Seminar and Interviews, 1984-1992, a collection of lectures by Audre Lorde (2020); In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, selected writings by abolitionist philosopher Joy James, compiled as editorial advisor to Divided Publishing (2023); and Another Sun, a conversation with political theorist Françoise Vergès (2026). Across numerous titles, Castro attends to latent inscriptions, whether met in archives, verse, in song or terrain. In each page, she honors the legacies of poets, wordsmiths, and clandestine philosophers.

Xiaoyu Weng (pronounced sh-ih-ow-y-uu w-eh-ng) is a curator and writer whose work unfolds through close collaborations with artists and cultural practitioners. She develops syncretic and hybrid frameworks that bring contemporary practices into focus, often spanning disciplines and cultural contexts. From major institutions to biennials and independent initiatives, her work has developed across international settings where friendships take root and new constellations of connection emerge. Weng has held curatorial positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg, and the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco and Paris, among others.

As the art world begins to anticipate what documenta 16 will bring, Beckwith’s team sets the tone for an edition rooted in dialogue and a shared commitment to reimagining the cultural landscapes of the future, aligned with the complexities of our global moment.