Steidlville

Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor is a Nigerian curator, critic, and poet. He has worked as an independent curator and has written extensively on contemporary African art and artists, as well as on American and international art. Curatorial projects include In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940-Present, the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1996); Modern Life, the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art and Newark Museum (1994); Mirror’s Edge, the Bild Museet, Umea, Sweden; Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Vancouver Art Gallery; and Tramway, Glasgow (1999-2001); and Stan Douglas: Le Detroit at the Art Institute of Chicago (2000).
Most recently, Enwezor organized The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; The Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and P.S.1, New York (2001-2002). In 2002 he served as the artistic director of Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. For Documenta 11, Enwezor co-edited a series of volumes: Democracy Unrealized, Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation, Creolite and Creolization, and Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, and Lagos (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002).
He is the founding publisher and co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, copublished with the Africana Studies Centre at Cornell University and is the co-editor of Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (InIVA and MIT Press, 1998).
Enwezor was awarded the Peter Norton Family Foundation Curator’s Grant (1998), and is a recipient of a Ford Foundation Research Grant. He lives in New York.