Karole Vail

Karole P. B. Vail (born 1959) is an American museum director, curator and writer. Since 2017, she has been the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Director for Italy. Prior to this appointment, she worked on the curatorial staff at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York for 20 years. Vail grew up in Europe and spent 12 years in Florence, Italy; she first became familiar with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection as a child. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Durham University in England and a Diploma in Art History from the New Academy for Art Studies in London.

Career Early in her career, Vail was an archivist and researcher at the arts publishing house Centro Di in Florence and worked as an assistant curator on independent projects. She is a co-founder and co-director of Non-Objectif Sud, a not-for-profit artist residency and exhibition program in the south of France. There she curated or co-curated such exhibitions as Peggy Guggenheim: A Centennial Celebration (1998); the museum's 50th anniversary exhibition Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, which examined the collaborative relationship between the two founders of the museum (2005–06); From Berlin to New York: Karl Nierendorf and the Guggenheim (2008); and a László Moholy-Nagy retrospective, Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (2016).

Vail's publications include Peggy Guggenheim: A Celebration (1998);