Koyo Kouoh (1967-2025) was the founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company, a center for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, Senegal, and since 2019, the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2024, she was appointed Curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale.
At Zeitz MOCAA, her curatorial work focused on in-depth solo exhibitions by African and African-descent artists, including Otobong Nkanga, Johannes Phokela, Senzeni Marasela, Abdoulaye Konaté, Tracey Rose, and Mary Evans. She organized groundbreaking exhibitions such as Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon and When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at Zeitz MOCAA, and Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Works of Six African Women Artists at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium in 2015. She curated Still (the) Barbarians, the 37th EVA International, Ireland's Biennal in Limerick in 2016. She participated in the 57th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, PA, in 2018, with the research and exhibition project Dig Where You Stand, a show within a show, drawn from the collections of the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. She was the initiator of the research project Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, co-curated with Rasha Salti at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany (2015-2018).
Active in the critical field of the arts community in a pan-African and international scope, Kouoh has a remarkable list of publications under her name, including When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022); Shooting Down Babylon (2022), the first monograph of the work of Tracey Rose; Breathing Out of School: RAW Académie (2021); Condition Report on Art History in Africa (2020); Word!Word?Word! Issa Samb and The Undecipherable Form (2013); and Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa (2012). She served as Curator of the Educational and Artistic Programme of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York from 2013 to 2017, as well as on the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012).
Kouoh was the recipient of the prestigious Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim 2020, the Swiss Grand Award for Art that honours achievements in the fields of art, architecture, critique, and exhibitions.
