Robert Storr, who began as an artist and soon became a highly respected critic, was a curator for 12 years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he mounted seminal shows of Gerhard Richter, Chuck Close, Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman and others. In what has become an exemplary career marked by the lucid prose of his catalogue essays – something all too rarely encountered these days – and the discriminating and sympathetic eye with which he puts together exhibitions, he has consistently raised the bar high, and then vaulted over it. From MoMA, he went on to curate the SITE Santa Fe Biennial and become a professor of art at New York University. One might call him the leading intellectual of contemporary art – our answer to Bernard Berenson. This year, however, he has surpassed even his own high-water mark. Named Dean of the Yale School of Art, in 2007 he will also become the first American ever to hold the post of Director of the Venice Biennale.