Mia Locks


Mia Locks is a contemporary art curator.

Career

Education

Locks was a 2018 fellow at the in New York City.

Curating

Locks was named Senior Curator and Head of New Initiatives of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, effective July 2019.
Locks co-organized the 2017 Whitney Biennial, with Christopher Y. Lew at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
At MoMA PS1 from 2013-2017, Locks organized many exhibitions including Math Bass: Off the Clock ; IM Heung-soon: Reincarnation ; Samara Golden: The Flat Side of the Knife ; and The Little Things Could Be Dearer. Additionally, she was part of the curatorial team for Greater New York, alongside Douglas Crimp, Peter Eleey, and Thomas J. Lax.
Prior to MoMA PS1, Locks worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on exhibitions such as Blues for Smoke and numerous permanent collection shows. As an independent curator, she organized Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945–1980, with David Frantz, at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, part of the Getty’s inaugural Pacific Standard Time initiative.

Writing and academia

Lock's writing has appeared in Afterall, Art Journal, Mousse, and several exhibition catalogues. She edited the first monograph of Samara Golden's work, The Flat Side of the Knife, published by MoMA PS1 in 2014. She served on the faculty of the M.A. program in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York from 2017-2019.