Aaron Levy

Aaron Levy, PhD, MPhil is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Slought. Slought is a twenty-year organizational effort he founded to engage the public in multifaceted dialogue about topical cultural and socio-political issues facing Philadelphia and the world. With an expansive network of university and community collaborators, Dr. Levy has developed and led hundreds of interdisciplinary programs and symposia across the humanities, art and design, social sciences, medicine, and other fields, featuring leading scholars from Philadelphia and beyond. He has also curated over 50 exhibitions and installations with artists and filmmakers such as Carolee Schneemann, Agnes Varda, Werner Herzog, Hermann Nitsch, Peter Greenaway, Susan Meiselas, Arakawa, Camille Henrot, and Devin Allen, among others.

Dr. Levy has lectured extensively, both nationally and internationally, on the power of the expressive arts to transform socio-cultural norms and create openings for change to occur. As a non-profit leader and curator, his work seeks to challenge seemingly intractable socio-political problems and address pervasive inequities and social suffering in Philadelphia and beyond. For more than twenty years, Dr. Levy has also conceived and curated several large-scale projects in both institutional and public settings around the world. These include serving as co-curator of Into the Open (2008-9) for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, which was organized on behalf of the US Department of State and the National Endowment for the Arts. This project explored the work of grassroots architects working collaboratively to invigorate community activism and environmental policy, and traveled to Parsons School of Design and the National Constitution Center. He also co-led the Perpetual Peace Project (2010-11), a global peace movement launched in partnership with the International Peace Institute, the United Nations University, and the European Union National Institutes of Culture. This effort included an exhibition at the New Museum and several international events, workshops, symposia, and other programs. Other projects include Mixplace Studio (2009-12), produced with People's Emergency Center and Estudio Teddy Cruz, which was a multi-year summer school and mentorship program for young adults in Philadelphia experiencing hardship. Dr. Levy has also co-organized several large-scale research initiatives and digital archives, including Ai Weiwei's Fairytale Project | 童话项目 | Märchen-Projekt (2011); A People War, a visual archive of the Nepal Conflict (2014); The Right to the Image, with the Syrian anti-war media collective Abounaddara (2015); and Add Oil Machine 打氣機 (2015), an online exhibition about the Hong Kong Umbrella movement. More recently, he organized Photographies of Conflict, a two-year exhibition cycle with artist collectives who use photography to contest dominant narratives of conflicts, and No Mud, No Lotus, a retrospective of Louverture Films exploring how filmmakers, thinkers, and activists can engage and record some of the most devastating and urgent issues of our day (2018-19).

A longtime advocate for the healing potential of the arts and humanities, Dr. Levy is also the Director of the Penn Medicine Listening Lab, Director of the Health Ecologies Lab, and co-Director of Rx/Museum, initiatives that reflect his dedication to new approaches to listening and care. Dr. Levy is a member of the Selection Committee for the Artist Protection Fund, an initiative of the Institute for International Education; has twice served on the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE); and was a United States Cultural Envoy to Pakistan in 2010. From 2015 to 2023, he was on the board of directors of AICA-USA, the International Art Critics Association. Prior to Levy's life in the academy and non-profit sector, he was a poet and visual artist.