Dorota Monkiewicz (1961) is considered to be one of the most outstanding curators and critics in Poland. In 2011-2016 she was a head of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum (MMW), which concept she co-created with Piotr Krajewski. She is an author of over 100 publications. She mostly deals with conceptual, critique, and feminist art, as well as with the experimental forms of arranging modern art collections.  

Monkiewicz graduated art history at the University of Warsaw in 1990 when she defended the master’s thesis “The theory and practice of the hermeneutic art works”. She worked as a modern art curator at the National Museum in Warsaw; in 1996 she founded the Foundation for the Modern Art Collections of the National Museum in Wroclaw (currently: the GESSEL Foundation). For many years she was a president of the Polish section of AICA. She organised some big, retrospective exhibitions of Ewa Partum, Zbiegniew Libera, and other representatives of the Polish modern art.

From 2009 Monkiewicz had been engaged in organising the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, and from 2011 she served as its director. She is a co-author of the MWW’s program, based on Jerzy Ludwiński’s idea of the Current Art Museum. She initiated the MMW’s Jerzy Ludwiński Archive. The museum’s vision, created by Monkiewicz, shifts a pressure from art itself onto the social projects and the local historical context, which opened the institution towards an educational and inclusive activity – what is symbolically underlined by the lack of the “art” term in the museum’s name.