Miuccia Prada formalises her role as director of Fondazione Prada

Miuccia Prada has formalised her role as Director of the Fondazione Prada and confirmed her commitment to present and future projects, as she has done for the past three decades.

The core of Prada’s life, founded in 1993 in Milan, hosts, in addition to its magnificent fashion shows, exhibitions of contemporary art and culture. The Fondazione Prada could be defined in this way as a cultural institution created by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, which operates with the conviction that art and study are useful and necessary to understand the changes taking place in the world through new and attractive perspectives.

In the words of Miuccia Prada: “From the very beginning, through the activities of the Fondazione I aspired to investigate human culture in all its variety and complexity. Throughout these thirty years, I have asked myself in different ways how artistic and intellectual research can influence people’s lives. To seek ever more contemporary answers to this question is the fundamental goal I have set for myself with the foundation”.

A Steering Committee, working closely with President and Director Miuccia Prada, CEO Cristian Valsecchi, Head of Programmes Chiara Costa, and the Fondazione’s in-house team, will be integrated into the organisation of the institution to explore in depth the most important issues of contemporary culture, and investigate the burning questions of our future.

The Steering Committee is composed of Giuliana Bruno, Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University; Giancarlo Comi, Honorary Professor of Neurology at Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan; Theaster Gates, artist, activist and professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago; Alejandro González Iñárritu, film director, screenwriter and producer; Salvatore Settis, archaeologist, art historian and professor emeritus at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

The main functions of the committee are to identify the most stimulating areas of research to develop multidisciplinary projects that can influence the contemporary cultural debate and to indicate possible lines of experimentation and education. Each member will contribute to a theoretical debate based on his or her experience and training: from education and visual studies (Giuliana Bruno) to neuroscience (Giancarlo Comi), and from social practices (Theaster Gates) to cinema and visual languages (Alejandro González Iñárritu) and dialogues between cultures (Salvatore Settis).

It is through continuous exchanges between people from different fields of knowledge and art that the Fondazione Prada aims to experiment with new cultural practices and to assert itself as a continuously evolving platform for sharing knowledge and advancing creative research. The Fondazione Prada evolves into a laboratory of ideas, where the coexistence of disciplines and languages generates cultural intersections and contributes to broadening the range of knowledge.