Gema Melgar

Gema Melgar is a cultural producer, curator and programmer. She graduated in Film and Media Studies at Universidad Carlos III and also holds an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture awarded by the Reina Sofia Museum, Universidad Complutense and Universidad Autónoma.

She is co-founder and co-director of This is Jackalope, a curatorial cabinet focused on the creation, production and promotion of experimental artistic practice. Since 2010 she has worked at the Art Programming Department of Matadero Madrid, a former slaughterhouse transformed into a multidisciplinary arts centre, where she focuses on visual arts production practices and El Ranchito Residency Programme. Prior to that, she lived in the UK where she worked for the International exhibition programme at Liverpool Biennial between 2006 and 2009, being responsible for several artists’ new commissions in the Public Realm. Since 2010 she has been part of Adaptive Actions’ editorial committee, a project that serves as a reservoir which provides a voice for adaptive actions developed in specific social contexts. She has also curated art projects independently and collaboratively in Spain, Canada and the UK.

Among her curatorial interests are the potentialities of actions in heterogenous urban environments and how art functions in site-specific and contextual situations. More recently she has been researching the relationship between art and technology and the engagement of artistic practice with ethnology and anthropology.