Lawrence Rinder received his BA from Reed College and an MA in art history from Hunter College. Rinder worked as the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art where he organized exhibitions including “The American Effect," "BitStreams," the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and "Tim Hawkinson," which was given the 2005 award for best monographic exhibition in a New York museum by the United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics. Rinder was founding director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in San Francisco, and served as Assistant Director and Curator for Twentieth-Century Art at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He has held teaching positions at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and Deep Springs College. His writing have been published in Flash Art, Artforum, The Village Voice, Fillip, and Parkett. His book Art Life: Selected Writings, 1991-2005, was published by Gregory R. Miller and Company in 2006, and his first play, “The Wishing Well," co-authored with Kevin Killian, also premiered in 2006. In 2005 Rinder he was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission by Mayor Gavin Newsom.
