From 2004 to 2006 she worked as a journalist in the Łódź edition of Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2006, she was appointed director of the 2006 Łódź Biennale (the second edition of the International Biennial of Art), and a year later she launched and became head of the first festival of design and architecture in Poland – Łódź Design. She also lectured on art history and marketing in the culture sector at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź (2007-10). She has authored many critical texts published in specialized magazines about art and culture: Obieg, Arteon and Kresy.
From 2008, she was the deputy director of the largest institution dedicated to modern art in Poland – the Museum of Art in Łódź. In 2014, she became the director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw.
(...) I could say that I am a Varsovian from Łódź. My family’s connection to the capital dates back to the eighteenth century. My grandparents lived and raised their children in the Żoliborz district until the end of the uprising. Soon after, they have moved to Łódź, where my mother was born. The way I was brought up made me emotionally linked to the city. (...) Thus, I could say that I'm not moving to, but returning to Warsaw
– declared Ludwisiak in an interview conducted by Anna Szawiel for Gazeta Wyborcza. In an interview with Małgorzata Piwowar for Rzeczpospolita she stated:
One of our priorities must be to introduce the CCA onto the international art circuit. As a matter of fact, the changes we have in mind come down to reflecting on and referring anew to the best traditions and the times when the CCA shaped discourse on art, and offered interpretations not only of art, but also of contemporary culture as a whole. It is also important to me to bring up the way Wojciech Krukowski thought of the CCA as a space where there is room for visual arts and performing arts in general: theatre, dance and sound. One of the main points of my proposal for the CCA's programme is to create a space for confrontation with globalization, which is our current reality. And this, I hope, will make us different from other Polish cultural institutions.
Following her five-year tenure as Director of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (2014–2019), Małgorzata Ludwisiak solidified her standing as a leading figure in the international museum circuit, seamlessly bridging curatorial practice with executive leadership and advisory roles.
In 2020, Ludwisiak was elected to the Board of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) for the 2020–2022 term, a collaboration that continued in the following years. As a board member of this prestigious organization, she has helped shape the global trajectory of modern art museology, notably through her work on the programming committees for annual conferences, such as the 2023 edition in Buenos Aires.
A year later, she took on the role of Chief Curator of Modern Art at the National Museum in Gdańsk, where she oversaw the strategic development and opening of NOMUS – the New Museum of Art. Located in a former shipyard school building, NOMUS has since become a vital landmark on the map of Polish contemporary art institutions.
Between 2023 and 2024, Ludwisiak returned to the Warsaw art scene as the Programming Deputy Director at the Museum of Modern Art (MSN) in Warsaw. Her tenure coincided with the critical preparation phase for the opening of the museum’s new flagship building at Plac Defilad. In this pivotal moment, she helped shape the institution's vision, balancing her curatorial expertise with the logistics of a major architectural undertaking.
In 2026, Ludwisiak is serving as the curator of the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, presenting Genti Korini’s exhibition A Place in the Sun. Drawing on the language of interwar avant-gardes and Albania’s history of colonial exoticization, the project explores how external gazes have historically framed Albanian identity as inherently "other." By elevating minority perspectives, the exhibition speaks for cultures pushed to the margins of history, ultimately asserting that a peripheral position can offer a deeper, more profound insight into reality than the center itself.
