Meg Shiffler
In residence at
Koynē Residency
Meg Shiffler is a curator, writer, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her current initiative, Cities of Glass is a ten-year independent curatorial platform featuring commissioned site-specific works by global artists working across performance, sound, social practice, photography, and more.
From 2005 to 2022, she served as Galleries Director and Chief Curator for the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), where she led a contemporary art program rooted in civic engagement, founded the SFAC Artists in Residence initiative, and developed an international Sister Cities traveling exhibition series resulting in partnerships with artists, curators, and arts institutions in Zurich, Sydney, Kiel, and Seoul. Over the course of her tenure, she worked with more than 1,400 artists from the Bay Area and beyond.
Shiffler has held an adjunct faculty role in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and was a member of Stanford University’s prestigious interdisciplinary Creative Cities Working Group. Her writing includes essays and interviews for various Chronicle Books publications, including Jim Marshall: Show Me The Picture (2019), Jeremy Fish: O Glorious City: Jeremy Fish (2017), and the new retrospective Susan O'Malley: More Beautiful Than You Could Ever Imagine (2026). Her episodic column I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer… ran on SFMOMA’s Open Space blog.
She is currently the inaugural Director of Artist Space Trust (AST), the nation’s first Community Land Trust dedicated to acquiring and stewarding permanently affordable, community-owned housing and live/work spaces for San Francisco Bay Area artists. AST was recently featured in The New York Times (Can Artists Help Shape American Cities Again?, February 11, 2026).
Earlier in her career, she curated and consulted for institutions in New York, including the New Museum and the Andrea Rosen Gallery/Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. In Seattle, she served as Director of Visual Arts and co-founded Consolidated Works, a 40,000-square-foot multidisciplinary art center. She studied at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY.