Denny Mwaura is a curator and writer with a practice invested in the social histories of Black life, life under political economies, and overlooked narratives of Chicago's creative communities. He is Assistant Director and Curator of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago where he organizes exhibitions and programs including Press & Pull: A Legacy of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (2026), Imagination Doctors (2026), Maria Gaspar: We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (2025), Learning Together: Art Education and Community (2024), and The Mask of Prosperity (2024).
He was Program Manager for the Black Arts Movement School Modality and has published in the Boston Art Review, E-Flux, Frieze, Jupiter Magazine, MIT Press, and New Art Examiner. Mwaura received his M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a recipient of the Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing, awarded by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Architecture and Design.
