0010 - Independent curator Heather Bhandari on her book, Art/Work and the business of art

Heather Bhandari is an independent curator; a co-founder of the project-based curatorial team and podcast, The Remix; an adjunct lecturer at Brown University where she teaches professional practice to visual arts majors; and the Program Director of Art World Conference (AWC), a business and financial literacy conference for visual artists which debuted in New York City in April of 2019.

The second edition of her book, ART/WORK, was published by Simon and Schuster in October of 2017. Bhandari is on the board of directors of visual arts at Art Omi (an artist residency in Ghent, NY) and the advisory board of Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn. She was on the board of NURTUREart for nearly a decade. From 2000 to 2016 she was a director of Mixed Greens, a commercial gallery in Chelsea where she curated well over one hundred exhibitions while managing a roster of nearly two-dozen emerging to mid-career artists.

Most recently, she was the Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon, a nonprofit in Brooklyn. Recent curatorial projects include a solo exhibition of Keith Lemley’s work at Urban Glass in Brooklyn and the group exhibition, Fertile Ground, at the David Winton Bell Gallery in Providence, RI, that includes work by Maria Berrio, Zoë Charlton, and Joiri Minaya. She and her AWC co-organizer, Dexter Wimberly, were recently listed in the Observer's "Arts Power 50: Changemakers Shaping the Art World in 2019." Bhandari received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Pennsylvania State University. Her career began at contemporary galleries Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin, both in New York City.