Leigh Markopoulos

Leigh Markopoulos (1968-2017) was a writer, editor, curator, arts manager, the Director of the Steven Leiber Trust, a significant collection of artist's books, ephemera, and works, and the chair of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco since 2008. Markopoulos came to San Francisco from London in 2002 to become deputy director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, working closely with Director Ralph Rugoff. From 2005 to 2008 she was the director of Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco. In London, Markopoulos was exhibition organizer at the Serpentine Gallery and at the Hayward Gallery, where she worked on numerous projects by artists including Richard Artschwager, Dan Flavin, Brice Marden, Hans Haacke and Bridget Riley, with whom she continued to maintain a close relationship. She was a Trustee of Creative Growth in Oakland, an art center serving artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities. She also was a Trustee of ULAY Foundation, established to promote and preserve the work of the artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen). Markopoulos worked on numerous editorial projects, and edited Great Expectations: Propositions for the Future of Curatorial Education (Banff International Curatorial Institute, Banff, in partnership with CCA and Koenig Books, 2016); Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2016); and Talking Contemporary Curating by Terry Smith (ICI, New York, 2015). She was about to complete an anthology of the writings of Zdenka Badovinac, curator and Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, for ICI's Perspectives in Curating series.