About
Hello, I’m Danny Orendorff.
I’m a curator, creative project manager, and writer whose work often explores the intersections of craft/DIY cultural practices, grassroots social-justice activism, and theories of identity.
Currently, I work as Project Manager of Interpretive Projects & Public Programs at The Contemporary Austin (TCA) in Austin, TX — formerly serving as Senior Director of Programs & Engagement from late 2022 to mid-2025. In addition to the development and production of live programs and performances, I manage cultural partnerships and collaborations with peer institutions nationwide and lead the creation of interpretive resources. These experiences and tools expand audience appreciation and understanding of exhibitions installed at The Jones Center, TCA’s downtown gallery building, or on view at Laguna Gloria, TCA’s 12-acre sculpture garden in West Austin – a site for which I am also overseeing the development of a new app offering multi-media content that explores the site’s ecological and historical significance.
Previously, from May 2018 – October 2022, I was the Executive Director of Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA. Founded in 1988, Vox Populi is a contemporary art space and artist collective that works to support the challenging and experimental work of under-represented artists with monthly exhibitions, gallery talks, performances, lectures, and related programming. One of the nation’s longest running and enduring examples of artist-run spaces, during my time with Vox Populi I focused on developing a membership and board that better reflected the diversity of the city in which it exists, produced new opportunities for artists working in socially/civically-engaged ways, raised funds through successful grant writing and community-based events/campaigns, and successfully guided the organization through the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic – re-positioning the organization as an unwavering champion of both racial and economic equity in the arts through a number of grassroots efforts.
Before this, I worked as Curator of Public Programs for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City from 2016-2018, at which I planned a range of discursive, cinema, workshop/demonstration, and performance programs in support of Museum exhibitions. There, I also curated the 6th Floor Education Center’s Project Space, as well as special projects and exhibitions occurring either in the Museum’s main galleries or 7th Floor Event Space. Special projects included the exhibition Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field (co-curated with Carli Beseau) and the durational performance event Kinetic Intimacies (co-curated with Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy).
From 2018-2019, I served as Curatorial Consultant for Envisioning Justice, an initiative created and facilitated by Illinois Humanities that engaged Chicagoans in conversation about the impact of mass incarceration in local communities, culminating in a 2019 exhibition curated by Alexandria Eregbu at The Sullivan Galleries of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Other recent independent curatorial endeavors include showings of new work by artists Jesse Harrod and Chris Bogia at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City. In 2017, I completed work on a celebrated group exhibition and publication examining the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis through the lens of youth, race, and pop culture titled One day this kid will get larger, held at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago.
I have served as a Lecturer at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Program Director and Manager of The Propeller Fund for the Chicago non-profit gallery Threewalls; and was 2013-2015 Curator-in-Residence for The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, MO, where I also assumed duties as Interim Director of Artistic Programs from mid-2014 to early-2015.
Past exhibitions I’ve curated have been presented by Antenna Gallery (New Orleans, LA), The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (Asheville, NC), SFCamerawork Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College (Chicago, IL), HF Johnson Gallery of Art at Carthage College (Kenosha, WI), and MU Gallery (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).
Frequently collaborating with contemporary art venues around the country, I have also published catalogue/brochure essays for exhibitions of work by Simone Leigh and Kate Gilmore at the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute; Sabina Ott at the Chicago Cultural Center; Phyllis Bramson at the Rockford Art Museum; and Tanya Hartman at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. My writing has also appeared on Art in America Online, Art21, Art Practical, Bad at Sports, and in Camerawork: Journal of Photographic Arts.