Renée Mussai is an independent curator, writer and scholar with a special interest in African and Afro-diasporic lens-based Black feminist and queer visual arts practices. As senior curator and head of curatorial and collections at Autograph, London for more than two decades, Mussai has organised many critically acclaimed solo and group exhibitions internationally and was responsible for numerous artist commissions, publications, and research initiatives, including Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Phoebe Boswell’s The Space Between Things, and the critically acclaimed Black Chronicles—The Missing Chapter programs (2014 –18). Mussai is currently research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; associate lecturer at University of the Arts London; advisory committee member of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation; and between 2009 – 2020, served as guest curator and non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. In 2023, she was co-curator for R/evolutions, the 14th edition of PhotoIreland and artistic director and chief curator at The Walther Collection, New York and Neu-UIm, Germany. Her publications include the award-winning monograph ‘Lina Iris Viktor—Some Are Born to Endless Night’ (Autograph, 2020); the co-edited Care, Contagion, Community—Self & Other (Autograph, 2021) and Ecologies of Care: Speculative Photographies, Curatorial Re-Positionings (Routledge, 2020), a special volume of Critical Arts. Her next book, Eyes That Commit—A Visual Gathering, will be published by Prestel in 2024.
Renée Mussai
Steering Committee
