Deena Chalabi is a writer and curator whose work explores relationships between individual expression, critical thought, and public imagination. As the Barbara and Stephan Vermut Associate Curator of Public Dialogue at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2014-2019), she devised and co-curated Public Knowledge, a multifaceted initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that looked at the changing city and knowledge in the digital age, in partnership with the San Francisco Public Library. Deena was also the founding Head of Strategy at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, which opened to the public in December 2010. She was a Columnist in Residence at Open Space in the summer of 2019 and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley (2019-20). She lives in Oakland and is working on her first book.