Michelle N. Mlati (b. 1993 South Africa) is a curator, urbanist, and writer whose practice has been embedded between Brussels, Johannesburg, Madrid, and Nairobi. Her work centers on creating intersections between art and the architectural and urban design practices through an intersectional environmentalist lens. She has guest lectured the series Curating Botanical Collections (2021), part of the Strategies for Art in Times of Change course convened by Dr. Portia Malatjie at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. As a curator, Michelle has worked with various artists in East Africa and in the diaspora continuing independent practice experimenting with The Forest and Desert School, which emerged from Sudan in the 1960s as a school of literature and poetry that influenced artistic practices of multiple generations.
Her most recent work is The Forest and Desert School Revisited (2022-23), a group show of 13 artists exhibited at Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi and also in collaboration with Borderlands Art based in Uganda and Galerie Polaris in Paris. She was a 2023 curatorial resident at The Green Corridor in St Gilles, Brussels. In 2024 she also collaborated in writing projects with the Belgian landscape designer Plant en Houtgoed, one of the finalists for the EU Mies Van der Rohe Contemporary Architecture Awards exhibition which was part of the 2020 travelling show she looked after. She is also a contributor to the art magazine Glean, with a recent interview with Sudanese modernist and contemporary artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag. During 2024 she will be participating in a residency at Untethered Magic in Kenya, a research-based contemporary arts space for the Global South to continue experimentation, cooperation and exchange with artists and institutions in the region.
