From Tate Modern and The Showroom to MACBA and the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, Elvira Dyangani Ose has built a career across museums, biennials and experimental cultural institutions. On 1 October 2026, she takes up a new challenge in Cape Town: helping define the artistic direction of Zeitz MOCAA as the museum approaches its second decade.
Elvira Dyangani Ose has spent more than two decades moving between museums, biennials, universities and experimental art institutions, developing a curatorial practice that connects African and diasporic histories with wider questions about contemporary art, public space and the role of cultural institutions.
From Tate Modern and The Showroom in London to the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), her career has consistently crossed geographical and institutional boundaries. Now, that experience is coming to Cape Town.
On 1 October 2026, Dyangani Ose will take up the position of Artistic Director at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), assuming responsibility for the artistic direction of one of the continent’s most internationally visible contemporary art institutions as it prepares to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2027.
Announced on 12 August following what Zeitz MOCAA described as an extensive local and international search, the appointment comes more than a year after the death of Koyo Kouoh, the museum’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, in May 2025. Kouoh had led the institution since 2019, strengthening its Pan-African intellectual and curatorial position while developing ambitious exhibitions centred on artists and practices from Africa and its diaspora.
Dyangani Ose therefore enters neither an empty institution nor a straightforward succession. She inherits a museum whose first decade established considerable international visibility and whose next phase raises a more complicated question: what should a major contemporary art museum operating from Africa become in its second decade?
Who Is Elvira Dyangani Ose?
Born in Córdoba, Spain, to Equatoguinean parents, Dyangani Ose has developed a career spanning curating, scholarship, museum leadership and institutional experimentation.
Most recently, she served as director of MACBA from September 2021 until April 2026. During her tenure, she pursued an institutional approach concerned with the relationship between the museum and its immediate neighbourhood, alongside broader questions of accessibility and social, economic and environmental sustainability.
Her departure from MACBA followed her appointment as Artistic Director of the second Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial. The Barcelona museum announced that the two positions were incompatible with the exclusive dedication required of its director, bringing her tenure there to an end in April 2026.
Before MACBA, Dyangani Ose was director and chief curator of The Showroom in London, an institution recognised for experimental commissions and socially engaged contemporary art. Earlier appointments included senior curator at Creative Time in New York and Curator of International Art at Tate Modern between 2011 and 2014, where she contributed to the development of Tate’s strategy for collecting art from Africa and its diaspora.
Her relationship with African contemporary art, however, extends considerably beyond collection-building within European institutions.
She served as artistic director of the second Rencontres Picha – Lubumbashi Biennial in the Democratic Republic of Congo and curated the eighth Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art. Earlier in her career, she worked at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville and the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Across these positions, Dyangani Ose has developed an approach in which African and diasporic artistic practices are not treated as peripheral additions to an established Western account of modern and contemporary art. Instead, they become part of a broader reconsideration of how those histories are constructed, narrated and institutionalised.
From Ibrahim El-Salahi to Project a Black Planet
Dyangani Ose’s exhibition history offers an important window into that thinking.
Her significant curatorial projects include Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist in 2013; A Story Within a Story… for the Göteborg International Biennial in 2015; Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer in 2016; Bouchra Khalili: Between Circles and Constellations in 2023; and, more recently, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica.
Developed across several international institutions, Project a Black Planet examines Pan-Africanism not simply as a political movement but as an intellectual, cultural and aesthetic force. Bringing together works and ideas across generations and geographies, the exhibition considers the networks through which Black cultural and political thought has travelled and been reimagined.
The project is particularly relevant when considering Dyangani Ose’s arrival at Zeitz MOCAA. Rather than positioning Africa within an already established international art history, much of her work has questioned who produces those histories, whose knowledge is recognised within them and how exhibitions can create space for narratives that have frequently existed outside dominant Western institutional frameworks.
Dyangani Ose is also Artistic Director of the second Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, scheduled across 2026 and 2027. The appointment extends her practice beyond the conventional museum environment and into public space, examining how art can interact with cities, communities and different understandings of place.
Alongside curatorial work, scholarship has remained central to her career. She studied Art History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and pursued studies in the history and theory of architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, as well as doctoral research in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. She has also taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, across areas including museology, curating, Black studies and contemporary African art.
This combination of scholarship, exhibition-making and institutional leadership is significant. Dyangani Ose has not only worked with artists and objects; much of her career has been concerned with examining the structures through which culture is collected, interpreted and presented.
What Will Her New Role at Zeitz MOCAA Involve?
At Zeitz MOCAA, Dyangani Ose’s remit will extend considerably beyond organising exhibitions.
As Artistic Director, she will oversee the museum’s curatorial vision and artistic direction, with responsibilities spanning exhibitions, research, collections and public engagement, as well as the institution’s relationships with artists and audiences.
Her appointment also reflects an important change in Zeitz MOCAA’s leadership structure.
Kouoh served as Executive Director and Chief Curator, combining artistic and executive leadership. Under the museum’s current structure, those responsibilities have been separated. Dyangani Ose will focus on creative, artistic and cultural direction while working alongside Managing Director Fawaz Mustapha, whose responsibilities include operations, finance and corporate governance.
The distinction gives Dyangani Ose a particularly focused mandate. Her task is not only to determine what Zeitz MOCAA exhibits, but to help define the artistic and intellectual position from which the museum operates.
That matters because Zeitz MOCAA occupies an unusual position within Africa’s cultural landscape.
Opened in 2017 at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, the museum operates as a public, not-for-profit institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, researching and exhibiting contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Beyond its galleries and collection, its institutional ecosystem includes the BMW Centre for Art Education and the Koyo Kouoh Atelier, its residency programme for Cape Town-based artists.
Its tenth anniversary in 2027 therefore offers more than an occasion for celebration. It creates an opportunity to assess what the museum has accomplished during its first decade and, more importantly, what kind of institution it intends to become during its second.
After Koyo Kouoh
Any discussion about Zeitz MOCAA’s future inevitably sits alongside the legacy of Koyo Kouoh.
Under Kouoh, the museum developed a more assertive Pan-African identity and a programme built around sustained engagement with individual artistic practices, including major presentations of artists such as Otobong Nkanga, Tracey Rose, Abdoulaye Konaté and Senzeni Marasela. Her leadership extended beyond exhibition-making into questions of scholarship, institution-building and the position of African contemporary art within international art history.
Dyangani Ose arrives with a different institutional history but a longstanding engagement with many of the same questions.
What may distinguish this next phase is the particular combination she brings: museum management, experimental curating, academic research, collection strategy, public art and experience navigating institutions operating across markedly different cultural environments.
She has also foregrounded collaboration in responding to her appointment, expressing an intention to work with Zeitz MOCAA’s team, artists, supporters and communities while fostering artistic exchanges across cultures and geographies.
There is continuity here, but there does not need to be replication.
Dyangani Ose is not being asked to reproduce Kouoh’s Zeitz MOCAA. Her appointment creates an opportunity to build upon the institutional and intellectual foundations of the museum’s first decade while establishing a distinct direction for what follows.
A Pan-African Museum in a Changing Art World
Zeitz MOCAA’s second decade will unfold within an African art ecosystem substantially different from the one that existed when the museum opened in 2017.
Contemporary African art now circulates through a wider network of biennials, fairs, museums, foundations, private collections and independent institutions. At the same time, conversations around restitution, cultural sovereignty, museum governance, local audiences and the movement of cultural capital between Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Gulf have become increasingly central to how institutions define themselves.
This changing landscape creates a different set of expectations for a museum such as Zeitz MOCAA. International recognition remains important, but visibility alone is no longer an adequate measure of institutional significance.
The deeper challenge is how a major museum based on the African continent can produce knowledge, build collections, support artistic careers and cultivate audiences from a position of intellectual and cultural agency.
Dyangani Ose appears particularly well suited to that question.
Her career has been shaped by movement between Africa and its diaspora, large museums and smaller experimental institutions, art history and contemporary practice, and curatorial work and organisational leadership. Rather than treating Pan-Africanism simply as a geographical framework, her practice has repeatedly approached it as a network of relationships, histories, intellectual traditions and cultural exchanges.
There is also the question of audience. For a museum that describes itself as both rooted in Africa and connected to the world, the challenge is not simply how successfully it participates in international contemporary art conversations, but how meaningfully its exhibitions, collections, research and public programmes speak to the communities and cultural ecosystems from which it operates.
As Zeitz MOCAA moves towards its tenth anniversary, Dyangani Ose’s appointment could therefore represent something more consequential than a leadership transition.
The task ahead is not simply to make an African museum increasingly visible within an established global art world. It is to consider how an institution based in Cape Town might help shape the terms through which that world understands, researches, collects and exhibits contemporary art in the first place.
With Dyangani Ose taking up the artistic directorship in October, Zeitz MOCAA’s next chapter begins with precisely that possibility.
