Lauren Cornell is the Artistic Director of the Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies , Bard College (CCS Bard). From 2017 to 2025, she served as Chief Curator and Director of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Studies at CCS Bard, where she oversaw the graduate curriculum and guided the trajectories of more than 100 students, now alumni.
At the Hessel Museum, Cornell has organized surveys of Stan Douglas, Leidy Churchman, Sky Hopinka, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Martine Syms, and Erika Verzutti, as well as career retrospectives of Dara Birnbaum, Stan Douglas, Ho Tzu Nyen (with Tom Eccles and the Singapore Art Museum), and Nil Yalter (with the Museum Ludwig). In 2019, she organized Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future (with Dawn Chan, Jeppe Ugelvig, Xue Tan, and Tobias Berger).
From 2005 to 2017, Cornell worked at the New Museum in New York, where she also served as Executive Director of its digital art affiliate Rhizome (2005–2012). While at the New Museum, she co-curated the 2009 and 2015 Triennials, among other exhibitions; commissioned works across media, including digital formats; and founded the annual conference Seven on Seven in 2010.
She is the coeditor, with Ed Halter, of Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (New Museum and MIT Press, 2015), and has edited and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and art magazines. Cornell is a recipient of ArtTable’s New Leadership Award.
