Marie Hélène Pereira is a curator and cultural practitioner from Dakar, Senegal. She is Senior Curator (Performative practices) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany, and Artistic Director at RAW Material Company, Dakar, Senegal. She is is profoundly interested in politics of identity as well as histories of migration. She lives and works between Berlin and Dakar.
Pereira has been a member of RAW Material Company since its inception in 2011, and she served as its Director of Programs (2019-2022). She has organized exhibitions and related discursive programs including the participation of RAW in We face forward: Art from West Africa Today at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; ICI Curatorial Hub at TEMP, New York; and at the 9th Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai (all 2012 and 2013). She co-curated Scattered Seeds in Cali, Colombia (2015-2017) and curated Battling to normalize freedom at Clarkhouse Initiative in Mumbai, India (2017).
As a member of HKW’s new mission of building a home for the plurality of worlds we live in, she co-curates the yearly Bwa Kayiman festival looking at histories of the Haitian revolution and the urgency of reparation, hosts and curates the culinary residence series Tongue and Throat Memories, co-curated the exhibition Echoes of the Brother Countries (2024) among other performative programmes.
In 2025, Pereira joined Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial team for Venice Biennale Arte 2026 titled In Minor Keys. Prior to that, she was the o-curator of a section of the 13th edition of Dakar Biennale of contemporary African Art (2018); and part of the artistic team of Still Present!, the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022). In 2021, she was a recipient of the inaugural ICI Curatorial Research Fellowship under the Marian Goodman Gallery Initiative in honor of the late Okwui Enwezor, conceived with artist Steve McQueen.
