Koyo Kouoh appointed curator of 2026 Venice Biennale and becomes first African woman in role

Koyo Kouoh, one of Africa's leading curatorial voices, has been selected to curate the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale, the world’s foremost contemporary art exhibition. She becomes only the second African-born curator to lead the event, following in the footsteps of Okwui Enwezor, who curated the 2015 Biennale.

Born in Cameroon and now based between South Africa, Senegal and Switzerland, Kouoh is the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA) in Cape Town, home to the continent’s largest collection of contemporary art. At Zeitz MOCAA, she has curated major exhibitions such as When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022), a landmark survey of contemporary figuration in Black painting, along with solo shows for artists including Tracey Rose, Otobong Nkanga, and Abdoulaye Konaté.

Prior to her tenure at Zeitz MOCAA, Kouoh was the founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company, a center for art, knowledge, and society in Dakar, Senegal. She also contributed to the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012).

“It is a once-in-a-lifetime honor and privilege to follow in the footsteps of luminary predecessors in the role of Artistic Director, and to compose an exhibition that I hope will carry meaning for the world we currently live in — and most importantly, for the world we want to make,” Kouoh said of her appointment. “Artists are the visionaries and social scientists who allow us to reflect and project in ways afforded only to this line of work.”

Kouoh’s appointment may surprise those who anticipated a more nationalistic direction under Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, particularly given that Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Sicilian journalist who became the Biennale's president last November, is a vocal supporter of Meloni.

“The appointment of Koyo Kouoh as the director of the Visual Arts Sector is the acknowledgment of a broad horizon of vision at the dawn of a day profuse with new words and eyes,” he said in a statement. “Her perspective as a curator, scholar, and influential public figure meets with the most refined, young, and disruptive intelligences. With her here in Venice, La Biennale confirms what it has offered the world for over a century: to be the home of the future.”