Jens Hoffmann has spent more than three decades moving between art, theater, writing, publishing, exhibition-making, and academia. His path was never linear but unfolded in unexpected turns, improvised decisions, and encounters that stitched him into the fabric of the contemporary art world.

Born in San José, Costa Rica in 1974, Hoffmann grew up across continents — Venezuela, Jamaica, Mexico, Senegal, and the United Arab Emirates — before moving to Germany in 1985. His cosmopolitan childhood left him with the sense that culture was not a fixed identity but something mobile, porous, and constantly in negotiation. This itinerant upbringing also linked him to a lineage: he is the great-grandson of Karl Hoffmann, a biologist and physician who traveled to Costa Rica in 1853 with Alexander von Frantzius, and whose name remains inscribed in the Latin taxonomy of dozens of species. Another branch of the family tree carried the shadow of art’s double life: his granduncle was Elmyr de Hory, the Hungarian-born painter and infamous art forger whose exploits fascinated both collectors and investigators.

Hoffmann studied theater in Berlin at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, the most prestigious theater school in the German-speaking world. His teachers included Manfred Karge, Andrea Breth, and Martin Engler, whose combined influence exposed him to both Brechtian dramaturgy and rigorous cultural sociology. He received a BA from Ernst Busch, followed by an MA in Advanced Studies in Theater and Dance at the University of the Arts in Amsterdam under Ritsert ten Cate, whose program was regarded as both prestigious and almost mythical because of ten Cate’s extreme contribution to avant-garde theater. This education rooted Hoffmann in a dialogue between theater, theory, and exhibition practice that would inform all of his later work.

Parallel to his curatorial and institutional work, Hoffmann pursued a sustained teaching career that influenced a generation of artists, curators, and writers. He began in 2001 as adjunct professor at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, before joining the M.F.A. in Curating Program at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was senior lecturer from 2003 to 2009. During this same period, he also became guest professor at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan, a post he held for more than a decade (2003–2017). From 2006 to 2012 he was associate professor in the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which coincided with his directorship of the Wattis Institute. In 2012, he served as visiting professor and course leader of the 4th Gwangju Biennale Curatorial Course, extending his pedagogy into Asia. Across these years he also delivered hundreds of lectures at museums and universities worldwide, reinforcing his reputation as an educator as well as a curator. In 2010 he conceived and organized the annual Max Wasserman Forum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, titled Parody, Politics, and Performativity, which brought together artists, scholars, and curators to reflect on the entanglement of art and politics through strategies of humor and performance.

In 1992, at the age of eighteen, Hoffmann became an assistant dramaturg at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt under Tom Stromberg, where he learned how narrative and staging could frame experience. After a brief stint in New York as an associate producer at Performance Space 122, he returned to Frankfurt for an internship at Portikus Kunsthalle, then under the direction of Kasper König, before joining the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1996 as an exhibitions assistant under Lynn Cooke.

The late 1990s were a formative period. Hoffmann worked on Documenta X (1997) as assistant curator of the theater and dance program with Tom Stromberg under artistic director Catherine David, and on the 1st Berlin Biennial (1998), working with Klaus Biesenbach, Nancy Spector, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. That same year he joined the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as an assistant curator, collaborating with the same circle of curators on large-scale projects, before moving to Düsseldorf to work under Jean-Hubert Martin as curator at the Museum Kunst Palast (2001–2002).

In 1999, Hoffmann co-organized the 6th Caribbean Biennial with Maurizio Cattelan. The project was never intended as a conventional exhibition but as a spoof of the biennial model itself. Staged on the island of St. Kitts, it brought together some of the most celebrated artists of the late 1990s — Vanessa Beecroft, Olafur Eliasson, Pipilotti Rist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Elizabeth Peyton, and Tobias Rehberger among them. There were no white-walled galleries, no carefully staged installations. Instead, the “biennial” unfolded in hotels, on beaches, and in improvised encounters, turning the art world’s own social rituals into the exhibition’s content. For some, it was an irreverent satire that exposed the emptiness of global art circuits; for others, it was a provocation taken too far. For Hoffmann, it was formative — a reminder that exhibitions could function as mirrors, staging not only artworks but the conditions and absurdities of the art world itself.

Around the same period, Hoffmann encountered the work of a young artist then barely known: Tino Sehgal. He became the first curator to show him, recognizing the radicality of his “constructed situations” — works that existed only through human interaction and refused documentation. In hindsight, that early recognition anticipated Sehgal’s emergence as one of the most influential artists of the last twenty-five years, reshaping how museums and audiences think about the ontology of the artwork itself.

In 2003, Hoffmann was appointed Director of Exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, a role he held until 2007. The ICA at the time was a crucible of experimentation, and Hoffmann’s exhibitions were known for collapsing boundaries between art and other cultural forms. He then crossed the Atlantic again to direct the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–2012), simultaneously overseeing the Capp Street Artists in Residency program.

From 2003 to 2012, Hoffmann also played an important role at Art Basel, the most important art fair in the world. As curator, he conceived and organized three of its signature annual programs. Art Perform (2003–2007) brought performance into the heart of the fair, long before live work had become an expected component of the art market. Art on Stage (2008–2009) extended this commitment to theatrical collaborations, fusing art, music, and performance in hybrid formats. Finally, Art Parcours (2010–2012) transformed the historic center of Basel into a stage for site-specific works, linking the fair to the city itself. Together these initiatives expanded what an art fair could be, embedding experimentation, ephemerality, and public engagement into a context otherwise defined by commerce.

Alongside these posts, Hoffmann began to cultivate an identity beyond the museum: as an editor, writer, and organizer of alternative frameworks. He founded The Exhibitionist in 2010, a journal dedicated entirely to the art of exhibition-making, and served as Editor-in-Chief until 2017. He was also Editor-at-Large for Mousse Magazine from 2011 to 2018. In 2007 he inaugurated his own nomadic institution, the Museum of Modern Art and Western Antiquities, through which he staged a trilogy of exhibitions that blurred fact and fiction, classification and imagination: Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative at Thomas Dane Gallery in London (2007); Lens Drawings at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris (2013); and Department of Carving and Modeling at Cristina Guerra Gallery in Lisbon (2019).

Beyond exhibitions, Hoffmann has been an exceptionally prolific writer and editor. He has authored and edited more than four dozen books and exhibition catalogues and written over 500 essays and texts for museums and journals worldwide. His publications include In the Meantime: Speculations on Art, Curating, and Exhibitions (Sternberg, 2020); (Curating) From A to Z (JRP|Ringier, 2014; 2nd ed. 2019) and its counterpart (Curating) From Z to A (JRP|Ringier, 2019); The Exhibitionist: The First Six Years (DAP, 2017); The Studio (Whitechapel & MIT Press, 2012); and Theater of Exhibitions (Sternberg, 2015). In 2021, he founded HMW Books, a publishing house specializing in contemporary art, and in 2024 launched Sélavy, an interdisciplinary cultural journal of art, literature, cinema, architecture, philosophy, and politics.

Between 2006 and 2018, Hoffmann worked closely with the Kadist Art Foundation, first as curator and later as senior advisor. At the time, Kadist was still a young Paris-based initiative, halfway between private collection and public laboratory. Hoffmann was instrumental in shaping its international vision. Over twelve years, he guided the foundation’s acquisitions and exhibition strategies, while also imagining how a private collection could become a public tool. One of his most enduring contributions was the formation of the Americana Collection, an ambitious ensemble of more than 300 works by emerging and mid-career artists from across Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean.

In 2009, he co-curated the 2nd San Juan Triennial: Poligráfica de San Juan in Puerto Rico, an exhibition devoted to printmaking in its expanded field. Hoffmann’s approach was to treat the medium not as a technical category but as a political and cultural language.

In 2011, Hoffmann co-curated the 12th Istanbul Biennial with Adriano Pedrosa. Structured around five large group exhibitions, each inspired by a work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the biennial sought to create a dialogue between politics and abstraction, intimacy and collective experience. It was widely regarded as one of the most ambitious and thematically unified editions in the event’s history.

The following year, Hoffmann co-curated the 9th Shanghai Biennial. Where Istanbul had been tightly composed, Shanghai was deliberately expansive, unfolding across the newly inaugurated Power Station of Art — a museum that Hoffmann himself had helped to develop in an advisory role — and extending into the city itself. Hoffmann and his colleagues introduced the idea of city pavilions in place of national ones, positioning Shanghai as a host for dialogues between global urban centers.

A decade after the Caribbean experiment, Hoffmann developed another format-challenging project with the artist Harrell Fletcher: the People’s Biennial. Conceived in 2009 and first presented in 2010, the project inverted the logic of biennials altogether. Instead of surveying the global art elite, the People’s Biennial showcased the creative production of individuals and collectives whose work lay outside the art world’s established circuits.

Between 2012 and 2017, Hoffmann served as Deputy Director of the Jewish Museum in New York, where he developed ambitious exhibitions that redefined the institution’s identity, including the remake of Primary Structures (Other Primary Structures, 2014), the first American retrospective of Roberto Burle Marx (2016), and The Arcades: Walter Benjamin and Contemporary Art (2017). He was also Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2012–2018), where he organized exhibitions such as United States of Latin America (2015, with Pablo León de la Barra), Detroit Affinities (2013–17), and Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance (2016).

Between 2013 and 2017, Hoffmann also served as curator for special programs and on the selection committee of the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center. He was a guest curator for the 30th Istanbul Film Festival in 2011. In 2012, he co-founded Vdrome.org with Edoardo Bonaspetti, Andrea Lissoni, and Filipa Ramos, an online platform that continues to screen films and videos by visual artists and filmmakers.

In 2018 Hoffmann founded the Office for Curatorial Wonders (OCW), an agency for exhibition-making based in New York but working globally. Three years later he established Hoffmann Maler Wallenberg (HMW) in Nice, a gallery known for ambitious exhibitions and close collaborations with artists. That same year he launched HMW Books, extending his editorial work into publishing. In 2024, he founded Sélavy, a cross-cultural journal devoted to art, literature, cinema, architecture, philosophy, and politics. As Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief, he shaped it as a space for long-form essays, critical reflections, and historical inquiries that resist the brevity of contemporary media. With contributions spanning disciplines and geographies, Sélavy sustains a tradition of serious cultural writing while opening itself to experimental voices and unexpected connections.

Over his career, Hoffmann has organized more than four dozen exhibitions, several of which have been described as “pioneering” by Hans Ulrich Obrist and “groundbreaking” by Tino Sehgal. The artist collective Claire Fontaine once called him “the Robespierre of curating” — a phrase meant as both critique and recognition, suggesting his radical, uncompromising approach to the politics of exhibition-making. Beyond institutions, Hoffmann has also run independent spaces: the People’s Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District (2011–2012), and Espacio Mango in Bogotá, Colombia (2019–2020), together with artist Adriana Martinez and curator Adam Carr.

Hoffmann lives with artist and art dealer Emily Sundblad, co-founder of Reena Spaulings Fine Art. He has two daughters: Sophia Bianca Hoffmann (b. 2003) and Gertrud Stella Adelheid Marie Sundblad (b. 2021). Their family life unfolds between New York, Stockholm, and the Côte d’Azur, while Hoffmann also maintains a home near Heredia, Costa Rica, tying him back to the landscape of his birth.