Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019) was the Director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, from 2011 to 2019, and his wide-ranging practice spanned international exhibitions, museums, academia, and publishing since the early 1990s.
In 1994, with Chika Okeke-Agulu and Salah Hassan, he founded Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, which is published by Duke University Press. In 1998, he curated the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial, and from 1998 to 2002 he served as the artistic director of Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. He also curated the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, Spain (2005–7); the 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); the Triennale d'Art Contemporain de Paris at the Palais de Tokyo (2012); and the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures (2015).
From 2005 to 2009, he was Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at the San Francisco Art Institute. He also held positions as visiting professor in art history at the University of Pittsburg; Columbia University, New York; University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Umea University, Sweden; and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
He is the author or co-editor of numerous books, among them Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: INIVA, 1999), Mega Exhibitions: Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002), Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: International Center of Photography; Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), and The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society (2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, 2006).
