About Allegra Pesenti

About Allegra Pesenti

A native of Milan, Italy, Allegra Pesenti did her undergraduate studies at the École du Louvre and University College London, and received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art where she specialised in the study of Italian drawings of the 15th and 16th centuries.

She began her museum career as an intern in the prints and drawings departments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Louvre before joining the drawings department of the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1999 as assistant curator.

At the Hammer Museum, she oversaw the Grunwald Center’s collection of 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists' books dating from the Renaissance to the present. She curated the exhibitions Gouge: The Modern Woodcut, 1870 to Now (2008), Rachel Whiteread Drawings (2010) and Zarina: Paper Like Skin, and was one of the co-organising curators of Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972 (2012).

Allegra was hired as Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston in 2013 where she presented her exhibition Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now (co-organised by the Hammer Museum and the Menil Collection).

She re-joined the Hammer Museum in 2017 as Associate Director and Senior Curator of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, and co-curated a major retrospective of drawings by Victor Hugo (2018).

More recently, she curated Drawing Down the Moon (2022), an exhibition on the iconography of the moon, and the first museum survey on Picasso’s cut papers/papiers découpés (2022-23), both for the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Allegra now works as an independent curator based in Rome, and her current projects include Invisible Questions That Fill The Air: James Lee Byars and Lee Seung Taek at Palazzo Loredan in Venice (2024), Arturo Herrera: Fare un Giro at Supernova in Rome (2024) and The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth (2025).

On The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth, she says:

“The eclectic charge of the installations in this exhibition voices the urgency of the environmental condition in the world today, but also the resilience and persistence of nature. Each flower represented here is associated with deep-rooted myths and symbolisms. Individually, they may be considered gorgeous nothings, but together, they manifest life and endurance against all odds.”

Image credit: Laura Hodgson