Dieter Roelstraete is Curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. Prior to this appointment, he was as a member of the curatorial team for Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017.

From 2012 until 2015 he was the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he organized Goshka Macuga: Exhibit, A (2012); The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2013); Simon Starling: Metamorphology (2014); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now(2015, co-curated with Naomi Beckwith); and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry(2016, co-curated with Ian Alteveer and Helen Molesworth).

From 2003 until 2011 he was a curator at the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA), where he organized large-scale group exhibitions as well as monographic shows, including Emotion Pictures (2005); Intertidal, a survey show of contemporary art from Vancouver (2005); The Order of Things (2008); Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner—A Syntax of Dependency (2011); A Rua: The Spirit of Rio de Janeiro (2011); Chantal Akerman: Too Close, Too Far (2012) and the collaborative projects Academy: Learning from Art (2006), and Kerry James Marshall: Paintings and Other Stuff (2013). 

A former editor of Afterall and cofounder of the journal FR David, Roelstraete has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues in numerous catalogues and journals including Artforum, Art Review, e-flux journal, frieze, Metropolis M,Mousse Magazine, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst.