CHICAGO—When Madeleine Grynsztejn becomes director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in March, she won’t have to worry about learning her way around a new city. Her curatorial career, which has taken her to Pittsburgh, San Diego and, most recently, San Francisco, where she was senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, also includes a stint at the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a curator and acting department head there from 1992 to 1996.

"I’m so excited to go home," says the 45-year-old Grynsztejn, who was born in Peru, grew up in Venezuela and London and was educated in New York, New Orleans and Paris. "I was born and raised everywhere, but Chicago is where I felt most at home."

While at the Art Institute, she kept a close eye on MCA. "I admired it then, and admire it still, for the courage of its programming and its capacity to speak in a very friendly language to its audience," says Grynsztejn, who succeeds the retiring Robert Fitzpatrick to become the museum’s first female director.

During Grynsztejn’s tenure at SFMOMA, she organized and raised funds for major traveling exhibitions, including her most recent show, "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson," which opened this past September to enthusiastic reviews and will travel in April to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has also directed the acquisition of many significant artworks, produced scholarly publications and forged strong working relationships with artists around the world, such as Chuck Close, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Tuttle.

At MCA, she would like to "integrate at an even higher level its various programs in performance art, exhibitions and education," she says. "I want those three areas to be more and more together in the eyes of our public."

"Homecoming" originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2008 Table of Contents.