Bonami was born in
Florence. He studied Set and Theatre Design at the
Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze. After a brief spell as an artist in
Milan, Bonami relocated to
New York City in 1991 where he was appointed U.S. Editor of
Flash Art magazine, a post he held until 1998. From 1999 to 2008 he was Manilow Senior Curator at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Artistic Director of Fondazione
Pitti Discovery in Florence and
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. From 2004 through 2008 he was Artistic Director of the
Villa Manin Contemporary Art Center in
Codroipo, Italy. He directed the 2nd edition of the
SITE Santa Fe Biennial in 1997, the
50th Venice Biennale in 2003, and was one of the curators of Manifesta 3 (2000) and the 2010
Whitney Biennial. In 2019, he started the new column on
ARTnews,
Ask a Curator. In 2021, as a controversy sparked about the dominance of white men at senior positions in Chinese museums, Bonami responded with a rant challenging racial and gender stereotypes about white men: "Under the new identity rules and laws, this article assumes, by how we look, that inside of ourselves, we feel always like white, ageing, western man. And this is not true, for example in my case, I often, often, felt inside myself, to be, sometimes, a thirty-five-year-old Iranian lesbian. So they don’t know what I feel inside." His rants on social networks also targeted far-right populism in Italy. In 2021, he launched his own
NFTs. ==Publications==