Scott Rothkopf is the Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He joined the Whitney's staff in 2009 as curator and in that role has organized Wade Guyton OS (2012) and Glenn Ligon: AMERICA (2011), which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Rothkopf co-curated the permanent collection exhibitions Sinister Pop (2012, with Donna De Salvo) and Singular Visions (2010, with Dana Miller) and jointly oversees the Whitney's Painting and Sculpture Acquisition Committee with De Salvo. Rothkopf also curated Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (2014), the last exhibition at the Breuer building, which traveled internationally to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He was a member of the Core Team which planned America Is Hard to See (2015), the Whitney's inaugural exhibition in its new building downtown. Most recently, Rothkopf has co-curated Open Plan: Andrea Fraser (with Laura Phipps), Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection (with Dana Miller), and Virginia Overton: Sculpture Gardens (with Laura Phipps) within the last year (2016) at the Whitney.

Rothkopf previously served as a guest curator at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, where in 2004 he co-organized This Is Not a Time for Dreaming (with Linda Norden), a site-specific installation and film by Pierre Huyghe made in response to Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. At the Fogg, he was also curator of the 2002 exhibition Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–1969, which traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

From 2004 through 2009, Rothkopf was a senior editor of Artforum International, to which he has contributed articles since 2001 on major exhibitions, including the Venice and Whitney biennials, and on artists such as Jeff Koons, Paul Chan, Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Diller+Scofidio, Carroll Dunham, Josiah McElheny, T. J. Wilcox, and Karen Kilimnik, who was the subject of his 2007 book, Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik's Fancy Pictures, co-authored with Meredith Martin. His other museum and gallery catalogue contributions include monographic essays on Wade Guyton, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami, Paul Thek, Kelley Walker, and Terry Winters. Rothkopf's essay on Surrealism in American art of the 1960s appeared in 2005 in the catalogue of Surrealism USA, organized by the National Academy Museum, and his text on Jeff Koons and the contemporary cult of celebrity was published in 2009 by Tate Modern in its catalogue Pop Life.

Rothkopf is a member of the board of trustees of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and has been a visiting critic at Hunter College and Yale University's School of Art, among others. He has served on numerous juries, including those of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the American Academy in Rome. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history from Harvard University.