Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator committed to fostering a transnational art world. Her equitable vision addresses the local and global concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums.
As the Founding Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit since 2013, Campbell Betancourt has developed DAS into the foremost research and exhibition platform for art in South Asia. The DAS’ exhibition, education and public programming makes it possible for over 300,000 local visitors, together with artists, architects, curators, and scholars from everywhere, to encounter art from South Asia alongside internationally recognized works that resonate with concerns in South Asia. By curating and supporting South Asia sensitive exhibitions, by commissioning new works from artists that highlight historical, geological and unexpected interconnections with the region, and by enabling cross-cultural, academically-grounded conversations through organized forums at and outside of DAS, Campbell Betancourt is laying the groundwork for valuable cross-cultural dialog, growing solidarity across the Global South, and the necessary rewriting of art history for our collective future.
An artist-centered curator, bearing in mind the 2021 opening of the foundation’s permanent home, Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park, Campbell Betancourt has been developing artist links/collaborations for long-term projects with the foundation working with artists such as Adrián Villar Rojas, SUPERFLEX, Monica Sosnowska, Haroon Mirza, Asim Waqif, Ayesha Sultana, Pawel Althamer, and Rana Begum to develop meaningful new commissions tied to the Sylheti landscape. Concurrent to her work in Bangladesh, Campbell Betancourt was the Founding Artistic Director of Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines (2016-18), a non-profit international residency and exhibition program with sites in Manila and Bataan. Projects she organized with artists she invited extend through late 2019, and she realized numerous solo exhibitions that debuted new work with artists such as Lucy Raven, Paul Pfeiffer, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Cian Dayrit, and Carlos Amorales.
Campbell Betancourt was appointed to curate Frieze Projects in London for its 2018 and 2019 iterations, putting to use her experience from DAS at organizing temporary events as well as curating simultaneously for both art world insiders and the general public primarily through performance. She chairs the board of the Mumbai Art Room, and has advised institutions around the world from the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, MCA Chicago, QAGOMA and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, FRONT Triennial, Carnegie International, and the Metropolitan Museum of art on their work with South Asian modern and contemporary artists.
In addition to the DAS catalogs, her writing has been published in journals, monographs, commercial gallery publications, and by forums offered by Mousse, Frieze, Art in America, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) among others. Teaching is an important part of her practice via the Samdani Seminar program in Bangladesh as well as running curatorial workshops at the Salzburg Summer Academy, at UNSW in Sydney, and RAW Material Company in Dakar, Sengal. In this spirit, she added an academic element to DAS by launching an Art History program in collaboration with the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories program, securing a major grant for the initiative supporting DAS, Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, and the Asia Art Archive’s work.
Educated at Princeton University, Campbell Betancourt has been working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010. She speaks Spanish and Chinese and some Portuguese and is in the process of learning Bengali. She currently lives in Brussels and Dhaka. Campbell Betancourt’s maternal family is of Chamoru origin and she is committed to supporting artists curators and writers of indigenous origin in all of her exhibition platforms, as evidenced in her work at Bellas Artes Projects and Dhaka Art Summit.