Alia Swastika graduated from the Communication Department of Gadjah Mada University. Since 2008 she has been the Curator and Program Director at Ark Galerie, Jakarta / Yogyakarta. As of now she is in-charge as the Director of Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation.
In 2011 Alia became the Curator of the Biennale Jogja XI with Suman Gopinath (India) and in 2012 she became one of the Co-Curators of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. In 2017, she was appointed as the Curator for Contemporary Indonesian Art at the Europalia Arts Festival and organized exhibitions in four museums in Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2019, she became one of the Curatorial Consultants for the Contemporary Worlds: Indonesija exhibition, at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Apart from doing curatorial work, she actively publishes writings in various newspapers, magazines, journals and books both at home and abroad. In 2015, she founded Study on Art Practices which published the journal Skripta, a medium for discourse on contemporary art. Her book “Negotiation Practices of Women Artists and Gender Politics of the New Order” was published with research support from the Ford Foundation in 2019.