Interviews From Our Community

Caro Verbeek (1980) is a curator, professor, author, Tedx speaker and maker specialized in sensory aspects of art history. She combines curatorial practices with scholarship and is known for her out-of-the-box approaches and often referred to as an ‘artistic scholar’ (a label she first resisted and now embraces). Over the past 20 years she has developed tools and courses to engage with art on a more embodied level for museums, art academies and universities. She has lectured and written widely on the topic of smell and touch culture and co-created numerous olfactory (re-)constructions of historical objects and events as part of her PhD-project “In Search of Scents Lost” with which she helped lay the foundations for olfactory museology. She also founded the first Dutch scent culture program called “Odorama”.

In 2021 she also became a curator at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, where she is working on the multi-sensory research project ‘clapping to the beat of Piet’ on visual rhythm in the work of Mondrian and on an exhibition on ‘synaesthesia’. Finally, Verbeek recently published the book ‘On the Nose – a Brief Cultural History’ which will be translated to Italian and Chinese.