Devyani Saltzman is a Canadian writer, multidisciplinary curator and cultural programmer. In her institutional practice she is the incoming Director of Arts for the Barbican and was most recently Director of Public Programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario, North America’s fourth largest museum, where she worked with the programming team to shape the museum as a forum for discourse, reflecting all communities and the narratives of Torontonians. She was previously the Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Centre, a leading arts and creativity incubator, as well as a founding Curator at Luminato, Toronto’s international multi-arts festival.
Devyani
Saltzman
She is a published author and her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, the Atlantic, Room Magazine and Tehelka, India's news magazine known for investigative journalism. Key to her research interests, and vision for the next chapter of the Barbican, is the potential to create a new type of ethos in public institutions that is truly in service to their people and public, in addition to presenting the best of new work and supporting artistic practice. Her upcoming nonfiction book, EXITING: Towards a Future of Work that Serves Us All, comes out with Random House in 2025. It explores the trend of increasing pushback against systemic change in our institutions, the exiting of diverse leaders from organizations they were invited into, and what new healthier systems could look like.
Saltzman has a degree in Human Sciences from Oxford University, combining sociology, anthropology, animal behaviour and evolutionary biology to look at the complex underpinnings of human experience. She is the Vice Chair of the Writers’ Trust of Canada and President of the Toronto Arts Council. Saltzman has written and spoken extensively about social change and leadership for The Walrus Talks, the Canadian Arts Summit, The World City Forum. She hosted the podcast The Culture Shift and is one of the founding members of the think tank Public Imagination Network.