Evelyn Owen

Evelyn Owen is a curator and exhibition producer based in New York City. She is currently the Associate Director, Curatorial Projects, at The Africa Center, NYC. At The Africa Center, she has organized numerous exhibitions highlighting the work of emerging and established artists from Africa and the African Diaspora, collaborating with artists, guest curators, and institutional partners to develop exhibitions including Resistance in Memory: Visions of Sudan (2025); Yusuf Ahmed: Between Nostalgia & Dreams (2025); Except this time nothing returns from the ashes (Asmaa Jama and Gouled Ahmed, 2024); States of Becoming (2022); Gymnasium (Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, 2019); All Power to all People (Hank Willis Thomas, 2019); and Lagos State of Mind II (Emeka Ogboh, 2014). The winner of apexart's open call in 2017, Owen curated the exhibition Tracing Obsolescence and related public programs. With Yaëlle Biro, she co-curated the exhibition The Aftermath of Conflict: Jo Ractliffe’s Photographs of Angola and South Africa at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015). A cultural geographer by training, Owen's research has explored contested geographical imaginations, especially in relation to contemporary art from Africa and its Diaspora. She received her PhD with a thesis on the geographies of contemporary African art from Queen Mary, University of London.