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Raul Zbengheci is a Romanian-American producer, organizer and director. If contemporary art and culture function today as an archipelago comprised of small islands, Zbengheci situates himself in the waters between them, following the currents and floating softly between different mediums, influences, and technologies. He works in the gaps between visual art, emergent technologies, contemporary performance, and public, site specific art.

Raul Zbengheci is currently the Deputy Director at NEW INC where he leads programming and strategy for the renowned art, design and technology program, including organizing NEW INC’s first festival, DEMO, which took place June 2023 and 2024. [NYT]

He has produced and curated projects with the Whitney Museum of American Art, LEIMAY, Performa, MoMA PS1, PROTOTYPE Festival, Times Square Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The 8th Floor, among others.
He has worked with a range of contemporary artists, including Ximena Garnica & Shige Moriya, Julie Mehretu, William Kentridge, Wangechi Mutu, Jason Moran, Morgan Bassichis, Kelly Nipper, Kaoru Watanabe, Christo, Luciano Chessa, My Barbarian, Brendan Fernandes, Autumn Knight, Yoko Ono, Christophe Meierhans & Ant Hampton, Robin Rhode, nibia pastrana santiago, Jesper Just, Sahra Motalebi, M. Lamar, Las Nietas de Nonó, Elizabeth Streb, Mariana Valencia, Wyatt Kahn, Olga Bell, luciana achugar, Alicia Hall Moran, Okwui Okpokwasili, Olivier Py, Johanny Bert, FUTURE BROWN, Mårten Spångberg, Francesco Vezzoli, and David Halberg.

He specializes in live and time-based art, ranging from performance and dance to multi-media installations. Artistically, he is inspired by the passage of time, conservation, and futures many thousands of years away. He continues to explore these themes through his own works while also striving to produce and present the work of artists working in the same field. He currently lives in New York.

Raul Altamura-Zbengheci is a Romanian-American founder, artistic director, and producer. He has spent the better part of two decades living in a dense cultural archipelago, floating between islands, following currents across fashion, art, technology, and culture, never quite belonging to any single shore.

He moved to New York in 2013 and worked in hospitality while moving toward his work in the cultural sphere. That led to the Whitney Museum, PERFORMA, Times Square Arts, PROTOTYPE Festival, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Then four years as Deputy Director of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator and one of the country’s most influential creative startup programs, where he helped the next generation of founders turn ambitious ideas into real companies. He learned what it takes to go from vision to working product. He learned what happens when the right community finally gets the right infrastructure.

He also watched that same community struggle to find meaningful rest and travel outside of work. Tab paralysis, velvet ropes, fake vacations (traveling for work pretending it’s and burnout all led to a landlocked creative class. That felt wrong.

Strawberry Sky is the company he built for the people he spent a decade helping build everything else: the curators, designers, architects, and cultural workers who know exactly what they want from a trip and have never had a brand that understood them back.

The sky was never the limit.