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People ·April 12, 2026 ·person

Paola Antonelli

Who they are

Paola Antonelli has been a senior curator at MoMA in New York for more than 31 years, and is the museum's founding director of Research & Development. She is the most influential design curator alive, famous for insisting that everyday objects — Crocs, the emoji set, Spanx, the Monoblock chair — are serious design worth putting in a museum. She expands the definition of design from luxury objects to the infrastructure of daily life, and treats design as a form of cultural and behavioral argument.

Core Ideas

  • Unlearning — designing around new modalities, not bolting them onto old ones
  • Pirouette — her current MoMA show on behavior-changing design

Connected (11)

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