Manuel Borja-Villel was born in Borriana in 1957 and graduated in Art History from the Faculty of Geography and History at the University of Valencia in 1980. He was a Special Student at the University of Yale in 1981/1982. He received a Fulbright grant from 1981 to 1983. He obtained a Master of Philosophy from the Department of Art History at the City University of New York in 1987. He was awarded a Kress Foundation Fellowship for Art History for 1998/1989 and he obtained a PhD from the Department of Art History at the City University of New York Graduate School in 1989.
He was director of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona from its opening in June 1990 until July 1998. At the foundation, he organized exhibitions such as “The Limits of the Museum” or “The People's City” and shows by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Brassaï, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Hans Haacke or Krzysztof Wodiczko.
He was then director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) from July 1998 to January 2008. Highlights from among the shows he organized include those on Vito Acconci, El Lissitzky, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Robert Frank, David Goldblatt, Luis Gordillo, Raymond Hains, Richard Hamilton, William Kentridge, Perejaume, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler or Antoni Tàpies. Some of the exhibitions he organized here included “Antagonisms”, “Force fields, an Essay on the Kinetic”, “Art and Utopia. Restricted Action”, “A Theater without Theater” and “Be-Bomb. The Transatlantic War of Images and All that Jazz. 1946-1956”.
He has been director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía since January 2008. Alongside research into the new forms institutions can take, an important part of his work at the Museo Reina Sofía focuses on the development and reorganization of the collection, and changing the way the works are shown. Highlights among recent exhibitions he has organized include “Pessoa. All Art Is a Form of Literature” and “Russian Dada. 1914-1924” in 2018, “Pity and Terror. Picasso's Path to Guernica” in 2017, “Marcel Broodthaers. A Retrospective”, “Territories and Fictions. Thinking a New Way of the World” in 2016, “Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism” in 2015, and “Really Useful Knowledge” and “Playgrounds. Reinventing the Square” in 2014.