Deena Chalabi

Deena Chalabi is a strategist, curator and writer. Her work advances the idea of inheritance as a creative practice.

Deena currently works as an independent advisor with individuals (cultural leaders, public thinkers, legacy holders) and creative, far-thinking organizations navigating complex legacies. She guides them on the strategic and narrative dimensions of our individual and collective inheritance: first seeing what they have inherited clearly and what original work they can do from it to design a lasting legacy. .

Previously, she was Senior Director at The OpEd Project, where she led institutional partnerships and revenue generation for a global initiative elevating underrepresented voices in public discourse. She also served as the founding Head of Strategy at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, and the inaugural Associate Curator of Public Dialogue at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Her curatorial work brings together artists who make visible how inherited material of all kinds becomes new form, expanding collective imagination about what’s possible. Her writing traces creative inheritance across generations, geographies, cultures and disciplines, in hybrid nonfiction that bridges memoir, essay and cultural criticism. She also teaches creative inheritance as method, equipping emerging artists, writers and other practitioners to see what they've inherited and work with it deliberately.

She has spoken widely, at museums, universities and beyond, including at Stanford University, Kenyon College, the New Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her writing has appeared in Bidoun, The New Inquiry, the Journal of Visual Culture and SFMOMA's Open Space, and her curatorial work has been featured by the BBC, the Economist and the New York Times. She has served on juries and advisory committees for the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation (which she helped to found), and the Office of the Mayor of London, among others.

Deena holds a Masters from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and a BA cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard College, where she focused on postcolonial history, theory and literature. She grew up in London and lives in Oakland, California.