The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, announced Wednesday Elvira Dyangani Ose as its next artistic director. She will begin in the post on October 1.
In leading the museum’s curatorial program, Dyangani Ose succeeds Koyo Kouoh, who served as executive director and chief curator of Zeitz MOCAA from 2019 until her death, at 57, in May 2025. (At the time of her death, Kouoh was also organizing the 2026 Venice Biennale, which opened posthumously in May; Dyangani Ose was also a member of the Biennale’s Golden Lion jury that resigned en masse.)
“It is a privilege to join Zeitz MOCAA. I am thrilled to come on board at this moment to continue its journey as a leading African institution with global reach,” Dyangani Ose said in a statement. “I look forward to working alongside the museum’s remarkable team, artists, supporters, and the local and global communities, building upon its extraordinary foundation by fostering meaningful collaborations and artistic exchanges across cultures and geographies.”
Dyangani Ose, who was selected after an international search, is currently the artistic director of the 2nd Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial. From 2021 to 2026, she was director of MACBA Barcelona, stepping down ahead of the expiration of her contract after the museum’s board of trustees ruled that the Abu Dhabi role conflicted with her MACBA job. She is currently a board member of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM).
Prior to MACBA, she was the director and chief curator at The Showroom in London, senior curator at Creative Time in New York, and curator of international art at Tate in London. On the biennial circuit, she has served as curator of Sweden’s Eighth Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2015 and as artistic director of the 2nd Rencontres Picha – Lubumbashi Biennial in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2010.
A specialist in modern and contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, she has curated solo shows for Bouchra Khalili (2023), Betye Saar (2016), Ibrahim El-Salahi (2013), and Carrie Mae Weems (2010), as well as co-curating the lauded “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica,” which debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024 before traveling internationally.
As a curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, she co-organized the 2006 exhibition “Olvida Quien Soy / Erase from who I Am,” which focused on 14 emerging South African artists and “the aesthetic strategies through which [they] defined themselves and their immediate surroundings, questioning the construction of new forms of aesthetic reflection grounded in diverse modes of self-representation,” according to a release.
“Dyangani Ose’s appointment reflects who we are as an institution—one rooted in Africa, while connected to the world,” Zeitz MOCAA cofounder and cochair David Green said in a statement. “She will oversee the Museum’s curatorial vision and direction, leading the institution through its next chapter as it approaches its second decade—building on the late Koyo Kouoh’s legacy, and honouring her extraordinary artistic vision and the institutional foundations she built.”
