The Museum of Contemporary Art announced Mia Locks will serve as senior curator and head of new initiatives, the latest addition to the MOCA curatorial team.

Mia Locks was recently named senior curator and head of new initiatives for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (photo by Pari Dukovic, ©Trunk Archive/courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)

In her new role, she will not only curate exhibitions and help steward the continued growth of the museum’s collection, but she will also help identify and develop initiatives to address the important social, civic and political concerns of the times.

“I am thrilled that Mia will join MOCA’s curatorial team,” MOCA Director Klaus Biesenbach said. “She has an outstanding curatorial track record that embodies research and courage, scholarship and innovation. As a contemporary art museum, MOCA needs to anticipate and respond to the world around us, and Mia will help us to lead efforts to support the issues that artists care about most. For example, museums have to address pressing issues of equity and inclusion, and climate and ecology, among others. I know Mia will help bring attention to these issues and support MOCA in being a responsible citizen among citizens.”

Prior to her appointment at MOCA, Locks was an independent curator based in New York and a 2018 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. With Christopher Y. Lew, she was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and previously held positions at MoMA PS1 and MOCA. Locks has organized numerous thematic and monographic exhibitions, including “Math Bass: Off the Clock (2015)”; and “IM Heung-Soon: Reincarnation (2015).”

“I am delighted to return to Los Angeles and to MOCA, where I started my career,” Locks said. “I look forward to working with Klaus and the MOCA team on exhibitions and programs. I’m also very excited to develop a variety of initiatives that support MOCA’s efforts to be an equitable, forward thinking and socially engaged cultural institution on a local, national and international scale.”

Additionally, MOCA recently promoted Amanda Hunt to a dual position of director of education and senior curator of programs, and longtime MOCA Senior Curator Bennett Simpson has been newly appointed to the position of senior curator and administrative department head. Anna Katz, who is organizing the forthcoming exhibition “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985,” has been promoted from associate curator to curator.

“We have a dynamic and evolving curatorial team at MOCA providing a multiplicity of curatorial voices for the museum,” Biesenbach added. “It is reflected in the diversity of our upcoming exhibition schedule, and we’ve only just begun to collaborate more widely.”

MOCA is located at 250 S. Grand Ave. For information, visit moca.org.