Koyo Kouoh announced as curator of the Venice Biennale

Koyo Kouoh , one of Africa's most influential curators, has been announced as the curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale , the world's longest-running contemporary art exhibition. Born in Cameroon, Kouoh serves as chief curator and executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town. She will be the first African woman to curate the Biennale.

Koyo Kouoh is one of the leading figures in contemporary African art , with over a decade of prominence in the field. With a degree in business administration and banking in Switzerland, in 2008 she founded Raw Material , an artist residency space in Dakar, Senegal. In 2019, she took over as director of Zeitz MOCAA , one of the largest contemporary art museums in Africa. At Zeitz MOCAA, she curated notable exhibitions such as "When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting" and a retrospective of Tracey Rose , also shown at the Queens Museum in New York. She has also curated several biennials and two editions of Documenta, one of the most important global art exhibitions.