David Velasco is a writer based in New York. He is the recipient of a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation (2024) and was a summer 2025 resident at Denniston Hill. From 2005 to 2023 he was an editor at Artforum and was editor in chief for the final six of those years. He has contributed hundreds of texts to the magazine, including essays on friendship and mourning and features on artists ranging from Adrian Piper to Lorraine O’Grady. His early days were committed to elevating the status of dance and performance in Artforum’s pages, and in 2016 he was the creator of and series editor for “Modern Dance,” published by the Museum of Modern Art, which has produced three books: Sarah Michelson (ed. David Velasco), Ralph Lemon (ed. Thomas [T.] Jean Lax), and Boris Charmatz (ed. Ana Janevski).
While at MacDowell, Velasco worked on chapters for his memoir. Prior sections were published in Harper's ("The Good Pervert," October, 2025) and Equator ("How Gaza Broke the Art World," December, 2025).
