The transformative power of art: Heidi Zuckerman CEO/Director Orange County Museum of Art - OCMA

Heidi Zuckerman is CEO and Director of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) and a globally recognized leader in contemporary art. She is host of the podcast About Art and author of the Conversation with Artists book series.Appointed in January 2021, Zuckerman led the museum in opening its new home in October 2022 designed by Morphosis Architects under the direction of Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne. The state-of-the-art 53,000 square foot building is double the size of the museum’s former location in Newport Beach. In a salute to OCMA's thirteen female founders, the opening collection exhibition will be 13 Women, organized by Zuckerman. This is the second building project she has completed. Zuckerman is the former 14-year CEO and Director of the Aspen Art Museum.

After reimagining the museum as a world-class institution, she founded its annual ArtCrush gala, raised more than $130 million and built a new, highly acclaimed museum with Shigeru Ban, the 2014 Pritzker Prize winner for architecture. At the Aspen Art Museum, Heidi Zuckerman curated the exhibitions Wade Guyton Peter Fischli David Weiss (2017), Yves Klein David Hammons/David Hammons Yves Klein (2014), Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper (2013), Mark Grotjahn (2012) and Fred Tomaselli (2009).From 1999 to 2005 she was the Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she curated more than forty solo exhibitions of international contemporary artists such as Peter Doig, Shirin Neshat, Teresita Fernández, Julie Mehretu, Doug Aitken, Cai Guo-Qiang, Tacita Dean, Wolfgang Laib, Ernesto Neto, Simryn Gill, Sanford Biggers, Ricky Swallow and Tobias Rehberger.

Formerly she was the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Art at The Jewish Museum, New York, appointed in 1993, and curated Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project, Contemporary Artist Project: Kristin Oppenheim and Louis I. Kahn Drawings: Synagogue Projects which traveled to The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.She has curated more than 200 museum exhibitions during her career and is the author of numerous books including a widely loved children’s book The Rainbow Hour with artist Amy Adler.

She was recently appointed to be an Arts Commissioner for the City of Costa Mesa.Zuckerman earned a BA in European History from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Art History from Hunter College at CUNY and holds a Harvard Business School Executive Education certification.