Ruth Noack, an art historian, writer, teacher, and exhibition maker, is best known to the global art world as curator of documenta 12. Between 2019 and 2022, she acted as Executive Director and Curator of The Corner at Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C., a cultural center embedded in a LGBTQ and HIV-focussed healthcare institution. There, she produced The Mental Body, on aesthetic acts of self-creation and self-care, Stay Alive to Life, on resilience in times of COVID, See You There, on making history at Whitman-Walker and, with DYKWTCA, and When We First Arrived..., an exhibition which amplified testimonies of children detained at the US-Mexico border through the works of 123 visual artists (in collaboration with DYKWTCA). Noack’s cycle of sketch exhibitions Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life was shown in Athens, Prague, Beijing and at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2019/20). Since 1994 she curated numerous exhibitions together with Roger M.Buergel, amongst them Things We Don’t Understand at Generali Foundation, Vienna and a cycle on Foucault’s concept of governmentality in Vienna, Miami and Rotterdam. Serving as Head of Curating Contemporary Art at The Royal College in London (2012/2013), Noack has taught at universities and academies for more than 20 years. She has also given lectures frequently, widely, and internationally. She has authored more than 50 essays on art and theory, as well as a monograph on Sanja Iveković, and edited Agency, Ambivalence, Analysis. Approaching the Museum with Migration in Mind (2013). In 2002 and 2003, she was President of the Austrian AICA.