Paola Poletto
Paola Poletto (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist-curator born in Italy and based in Toronto on land that is Michi Sagging Nishnawbe territory. Her career spans both independent programming and leadership roles in the non-profit and government sectors. Her work has focused on cultural and community development with social and economic impact, leading creative teams through the full production cycle of digital and analog interactive content. As Director of Engagement & Learning at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2013-25), Paola oversaw public programs and formal and informal learning experiences. Engaged with one of the largest museums in North America, her portfolio included the oversight of the Gallery School's robust studio offerings and teaching staff; and curating the AGO x RBC Artist-in-Residence signature program, collaborating with over 40 artists on large scale projects, and mentoring their engagement with the museum and its audiences. As Senior Director of Programs and Exhibitions at the Design Exchange, she led a complex international, national and community focused portfolio of presentations, research, and professional development, including the executive and artistic direction of an annual cross disciplinary media festival and exhibitions program at the intersection of art, science and design, produced with the Ontario Science Centre and Harbourfront Centre. Paola’s professional career spans pivotal positions of growth, diplomacy and leadership in municipal as well as foreign affairs offices. Her doctoral practice-based research expands upon the current scholarship on transformational museum experiences by including more artist perspectives in the mix.
Paola’s independent work is rooted in social practice and site-specificity, experiential design, and a methodology inspired by feminist, queer and indigenous relational aesthetics. She has over 25 years of coordination and exhibition experience, remaining focused on long-form durational research and presentation with emphasis on engagement and process. Paola has co-edited/curated/organized visual and literary reflections with projects taking place internationally and locally.
Paola’s career as an artist and museum worker situates her doctoral research as an autotheory (a theory that one develops out of a personal experience and art practice). Her project looks at what it means and feels like to be an artist/art worker in a museum today. Since 2021, Paola has paired two main sites — Toronto’s civic reflecting pool at Mel Lastman Square, and the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Walker Court — to develop a long-form first-person response to an ontological question about creativity in the museum. She has been walking to compose her photographs in both locations, experimenting with a multi-perspective form of looking and a means to both decentralize the power structures within which she moves, whether art world broadly speaking, or other, and to also "destabilize" the viewer's gaze in a meaningful way. The glitches, black surfaces of digital non-computes, become places "of opportunity" and the blurry bits are sites of "movement and change.” Threads have become central to Paola’s recent work. The strings that puncture through the photograph’s surface with needle and thread are “image energy.”
Paola holds a BFA (York University), MFA (Western University). She has received certification from the International Leadership Program in Visual Arts Management jointly conferred by Deusto University with New York University and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; participated in the Transforming Museums Interaction Lab organized by the Cooper Hewitt and Smithsonian Museum; is a current member of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) and the Photography Network; and recently travelled to Mexico’s Arquetopia Foundation to further develop her photographic body of work in residence.