Måns Wrange was born in 1961 in Åhus, Sweden. Between the mid and the late-80s, Wrange lived in Amsterdam, and moved then to New York, where he lived until the mid '90s when he returned to Stockholm for a position as head of the department and professor at Konstfack -University College of Arts, Crafts and Design.Wrange has also held artist-in-residencies at InSite in Tijuana/San Diego, at P.S. 1 Studio Program in New York and at Robben Island Museum, Cape Town. Måns Wrange is currently based in Värmdö outside Stockholm, Sweden.

Måns Wrange has a mixed educational background. He started study Contemporary Classical Music at Fylkingen – Center for New Music and Intermedia Art in Stockholm, with a focus on electronic music composition (1983-84). Since his interest in art deals with philosophical, ethnological and socio-political questions, he decided to study philosophy, aesthetics and history ideas at Stockholm University (1984-86), After that, he studied at two of the most internationally oriented post graduate art programs in Europe at the time: Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, The Netherlands (1988-89),  and at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (1989-90).

Måns Wrange’s work is widely exhibited internationally and has been included in over 200 exhibitions, biennials, and festivals in Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, including Manifesta 4, Frankfurt; Manifesta 7/The Rest is Now, Bolzano/Bozen (as the director of CuratorLab); ICA – The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; InSite_05, San Diego/Tijuana; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles; De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; The 6th Baltic Contemporary Art Biennale HABITAT, Szczecin; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Arnolfini Art Center, Bristol; Central House of Artists, Moscow; Lunds Konsthall; PROSPECT 93, Frankfurt; ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg; Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Kunsthalle Göppingen, Göppingen; Malmö Konstmuseum; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey  (MARCO), Monterrey; Momentum 04 – Nordic Biennial for Contemporary Art, Moss; Oriel Davies Gallery, Wales; The Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; Montehermoso Cultural Centre, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Clocktower Gallery, New York; Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art Contemporain, Luxembourg; PM Galley & House, London, and CCS Bard Center for Curatorial Studies at Art in General, New York.

Since 2014 Måns Wrange is a visiting professor at DSV at Stockholm University where he also holds the position as the director of CATS – Centre for Art and Technology in Society.  2008-2014 Måns Wrange was rector of the Royal Institute of Art / Kungl. Konsthögskolan. 1995-2014 he served in different leading positions — as a professor, head of the department, and program director — at the Department of Fine Art at Konstfack, University College of Art, Crafts and Design. At Konstfack he co-founded a new interdisciplinary art department in 1997, was the founding director of one of the first curatorial programs in Europe in 1999, which was in 2006 transformed into CuratorLab – an international research program for curators, writers and artists. He also co-founded the two master programs Art in The Public Real and WIRE – Curatorial Practice and Critical Writing in 2006. 2005-2010 he was also research supervisor at the Norwegian Artistic Research Program at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and 2010-2014 he was PhD supervisor at DSV, Stockholm university. Wrange has also been a guest lecturer at several art schools in Europe and the US.

Måns Wrange has participated in several interdisciplinary research project including Public Speaking – On art in relation to public opinion making (2008-2014), in collaboration with Marysia Lewandowska at Konstfack - University College of Arts, Crafts and Design and Maria Karlsson at Uppsala university (funded by The Swedish Research Council); and The Modern Loneliness/The Average Citizen (2001-2006) in collaboration with Maria Karlsson, PhD and lecturer in Rhetoric, Literary Studies and Gender Studies at Uppsala University (funded by Uppsala University and Konstfack).

Måns Wrange’s articles and essays have been published in numerous journals on art, architecture and film, including Cabinet Magazine, Volume Magazine, Conditions Magazine, Index Magazine, ARCHIS – Magazine for Architecture, The City and Visual Culturea, and Manifesta Journal, as well as in some twenty books including Scandalous – A reader on Art and Ethics, (ed. Nina Möntmann), Sternberg Press, Berlin-New York, 2013; 163 04/ Venezia, New York, Paris, Tensta Konsthall, 2009; A Fiesta of Tough Choices: Contemporary Art in the Wake of Cultural Policies, (ed. ‪Maria Lind, ‪Tirdad Zolghadr), Torpedo Press, 2007; Den moderna ensamheten (ed. Maria Karlsson), Symposium förlag, 2006; Konst som rörlig bild–från Diagonalsymfonin till Whiteout (red. Astrid Söderbergh Widding), Bokförlaget Langenskiöld/SAK, Stockholm 2006, and We are All Normal (ed. Katya Sander and Simon Sheikh), Black Dog Publishing, London 2001.

In parallel with his practice as an artist, Måns Wrange, has curated and some ten international exhibitions and some twenty conferences. The most recent project (that he co-curated as the director of CuratorLab) was Hot Desking, one of the special projects of the Manifesta 7 exhibition "The Rest is Now" in Bolzano, Italy in 2008 (by invitation of the curatorial team Raqs Media Collective). The project consisted of four publications and four discursive events in four cities – Rome, Stockholm, Paris and Istanbul – which functioned as independent but related satellites of Manifesta 7, linking ideas, themes and discussions, initiated by Manifesta, to the local context of the four cities.

In 1998 Måns Wrange curated The Stockholm Syndrome, an art exhibition exploring the hostage syndrome in contemporary culture which included artworks by Academy Training Group, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Chris Burden, Thomas Demand, Stan Douglas, Renée Green, Johan Grimonprez, Abigail Lane, Shirin Neshat, Ricardo de Oliveira, Julia Scher, Jörgen Svensson and Knut Åsdam and an essay by Joshua Decter. In 1991 and 1992 he curated as series of video programs for The Stockholm Filmfestival in collaboration with Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Examples of international conferences that he has organized are: Is Public Space for Everyone? (2013) in cooperation with Magdalena Malm/Public Art Agency Sweden; Who is the Audience? at Moderna Museet i Stockholm (2012); Why do Artists need Research? (2011) at the Royal Institute of Art; Curating Friction – Between censorship and repressive tolerance and Coloring Outside the Lines – When the borderlines between artists and curators blur (2007) a two-day symposium at Artissima in Milan.

From 1982 to 1989 Måns Wrange was one of the founding members of the curatorial and artist's collective Vavd Editions, which organized exhibitions, talks, art projects and published artist's books and mutiples.

In the beginning of the 90's, Måns Wrange co-organized the culture club Salongen (The Salon), where he curated a series of evenings with exhibitions, debates, performances, screenings, publications and food. In 1994 Måns Wrange co-founded the foundation MAP – Media Art Projects, which organized exhibitions, projects and conferences on art, society and new media.

In 1998, Måns Wrange and architect Igor Isaksson founded OMBUD – an interdisciplinary think tank, which is organized as a network of people from the fields of social science, humanities, ICT/new media and the arts – which conducts the projects, which Wrange has been working with the last two decades.

2005-2006 Måns Wrange was a member of The Committee on IT and Culture, which was a subcommittee of the IT Commission of Sweden, established by the Swedish Government.

Since 2012 he is a member of the board of the non-profit organisation FSL – Fria seminariet för litterär kritik (The Independent Seminar for Literary Critique).

2011-2013 Wrange was a member of the board of Statens Konstråd/Public Art Agency Sweden.

2013-2015 Måns Wrange was chair of the board of the Artistic Research School/Konstnärliga forskarskolan, which was an international artistic research program in Sweden, based at Lund University and in operation between 2010 and 2015.

Since 2014 Måns Wrange is a member of the board of Statens kulturråd/The Swedish Arts Council.