Michelle Mlati

Michelle Mlati (b. 1993 South Africa) is a curator and researcher working between the intersections of art, architecture, and urban design practices that span from the 1960s to the present. She currently dedicates part of her time as a curatorial assistant at Palazzo Grassi/Pinault Collection in Venice for Michael Armitage's (b.1984, Kenya) 2026 exhibition, The Promise of Change with over 100 works of paintings and drawings spanning a decade to the present, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais and Caroline Bourgeois and Hans Ulrich Obrist for the catalogue. She studied a BA Honours in Curatorship (2015) from the University of Cape Town and an MSc in Human Settlements from KU Leuven (2020) in Belgium, specializing in Art and Architecture. As a 2023 ICI Marian Goodman Gallery Curatorial Research Fellow in honour of the late Okwui Enwezor, she researched The Forest and Desert School, a Sudanese literary movement influential in modern and contemporary art in the East African region, including an interview with Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (b. 1939 Sudan). She is contributing author for an upcoming chapter in Plant Space: Territories, Architectures and Technologies of the Vegetal to be published by Sternberg Press and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in April 2026. She curated the group show, Inceptisols: No Soil nor Sand (2023) as a resident at The Green Corridor in Brussels featuring Ola Hassanain, Khaled Jarrar, Tibian Bahari and Graham Kelly. She has contributed texts in the art magazines Glean, Hyperallergic and published her first curatorial work 'What time is it? WTII' (2015) in Afrikadaa a bilingual French and English quarterly publication dedicated to contemporary art edited by Pascale Obolo in the Museum On/Off (2017) issue 11 rethinking/reinventing museums as a form of ‘paper museum’ curated by Alicia Knock at the Centre Pompidou. This includes a podcast for Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Embodied Memory (2024) episode of the Swamplands series in conversation with artist and architect Ola Hassanain (b.1985 Khartoum).