Beatrice Leanza

Beatrice Leanza is a cultural strategist, museum director and critic with a background in Asian studies whose projects span global platforms.

She was based in Beijing for 17 years where she was the creative director of Beijing Design Week, during which she championed impact-driven methodologies of creative collaboration among professional, public and civic stakeholders responding to urban and eco-social predicaments, most notoriously in historic hutong districts of the capital.

She is co-founder of The Global School (Beijing), the first independent institute for interdisciplinary creative research established in the PRC.

She later served as director of maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon, Portugal), and director of mudac – Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts (Lausanne, Switzerland). She is internationally recognized for her visionary leadership centering participation, transdisciplinarity and experimental curatorial approaches founded on community building and place making applied to institutional and cultural agency.

Her new book The New Design Museum – Co-Creating the Present, Prototyping the Future (Park Books, 2025) explores institutional practices addressing 21-century challenges and was listed among the best books of 2025 in the Financial Times.

International projects include Across Chinese Cities, a research program presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale at three editions from 2014 to 2018 and The Um Slaim School – An Architecture of Connection, Saudi Arabia Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, piloting a new pedagogical initiative whose public program engaged over 60 practitioners from the MENA region. The accompanying research volume Connections as Method¬—Relational Pedagogies and Participatory Spatial Practice was released by Mousse Publishing (2025).

She is a member of the international advisory board of Design Trust (Hong Kong) and is a European Young Leader (2018 – present; Friends of Europe Foundation, Brussel).

Articles and interviews about her and her projects have appeared in Artforum, Abitare, CNN Style, Domus, Dezeen, Frieze, Flash Art International, Monocle, The Architect Newspaper, T Magazine/The New York Times, Il Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Vogue Italia, among many others.

TRANSFORMATION AS METHOD – Critical Institutional Practice and the 21st Century

In my book “The New Design Museum – Co-creating The Present, Prototyping the Future” (Park Books, 2025), I argue for the critical role of institutions of culture in mediating engagement with the unabated challenges and ambitions of the 21st century. Through discursive articulations and practical case studies, I explore how the grammar of custody that once rooted them in the stewardship of specialist disciplines and conservation imperatives needs transforming into a generative, purpose-driven agency—one capable of responding to the social, ecological and ethical demands of today’s world.

Drawing on these ideas and my experience directing institutions, large scale events and experimental initiatives spanning global platforms, I unpack three curatorial methodologies operating at distinct spatio-temporal scales—the city (Beijing Design Week), the museum building (maat, Lisbon), the perennial event (National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the Venice Architecture Biennale)—where participatory paradigms centering collaboration, transdisciplinarity and knowledge-making are at play. Through these examples, curatorial practice emerges as a relational mechanism of transformation, both locally relevant and globally resonant. Here culture is no longer platformed by means of representation but produced and mobilized through collaborative networks of distributed intelligence addressing real-world predicaments—reconfiguring the rapport among private, public and civic stakeholders by way of collective empowerment and shared inquiry.