Renée Mussai
Renée Mussai is an independent London-based curator, writer, art historian and scholar of visual culture, with a special interest in Black feminist practices. Formerly senior curator and head of curatorial and collections at Autograph — a London-based arts charity that promotes photography and film addressing cultural identity, race, representation and human rights — Mussai has curated and edited many award-winning projects such as the artist monographs / touring exhibitions Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness (2017 – 2021; 2018; 2024) and Lina Iris Viktor’s Some Are Born to Endless Night — Dark Matter (2020), and the multi-faceted, critically acclaimed archive research and exhibition programme Black Chronicles – The Missing Chapter (2014 – 18). Mussai guest-curated Black Chronicles IV at University of Johannesburg’s FADA Gallery with VIAD Research Centre, and co-convened the international three-day conference Curatorial Care—Past Humanising Practices: Past Presences as Present Encounters.
Since leaving Autograph in 2022, she has acted as curatorial consultant and artistic director of The Walther Collection, New York and Neu-Ulm (2022 – 23) and served as a guest curator for R/evolutions, the 14th editions of PhotoIreland Festival (2023), where she presented the group exhibition, I See the Face of Things to Come. In 2024, she was guest curator at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (USA) where she curated the travelling retrospective solo exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love (2024).
Amongst her most recent publications is the edited volume Black Chronicles: Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain (May 2025), with contributions by Mussai, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Lola Jaye, Neelika Jayawardane, Mark Sealy, and Val Wilmer; and the forthcoming sole-authored book Eyes That Commit: A Visual Gathering (October 2025, TBC).
Mussai’s research-led curatorial and scholarly practice oscillates fluidly between nineteenth-century archive projects and contemporary lens-based visual art, with a focus on activist modes of portraiture that foreground social and visual justice. Over the past twenty years, she has organised more than fifty solo and group exhibitions in Europe, South Africa and America.
During her two-decade tenure at Autograph, Mussai led numerous curatorial, educational, editorial and other public programme initiatives, including establishing its permanent collection of photography and Archive Research Centre at Rivington Place, Shoreditch, London (UK).
Mussai’s writing has appeared in a range of artist monographs, anthologies and catalogues by leading publishers including Aperture, Tate, Phaidon, Prestel, Thames & Hudson, and in publications / platforms such as Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art; Foam Magazine; and 1000 Words. Past books include James Barnor: Ever Young (2015), the veteran Ghanaian photographer’s first monograph, as well as the co-edited Care, Contagion, Community—Self & Other (2021); a Critical Arts special issue titled Ecologies of Care: Speculative Photographies; Curatorial Re-Positionings (2020) and Glyphs—Acts of Inscription (2014), amongst others.
Mussai lectures and publishes internationally on contemporary art, visual / cultural politics, and curatorial studies. She is currently associate guest lecturer at University of the Arts London and at Sotheby’s Art Institute (UK). Between 2010 and 2020, she was non-resident fellow and regular guest curator at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). Amongst various other member- and trusteeships of arts committees and boards of governance, Mussai presently serves as chair of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation advisory council. Additionally, she is a final year PhD doctoral candidate in Art History at the University College of London, working with Professor Tamar Garb.
Renée Mussai joined VIAD in 2018.
