Elvira Dyangani Ose, a Spanish art curator and museum director, has been appointed artistic director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), in Cape Town, South Africa, the institution announced on Wednesday.
The museum opened in 2017, housed in renovated grain silos, and is one of the largest institutions in Africa devoted to the continent’s contemporary art. It has established itself as a major global venue in the years since. But the sudden death last year of its executive director and chief curator, Koyo Kouoh, at age 57, left its future plans uncertain.
Like Kouoh, Dyangani Ose has global connections, having spent stretches of her career as a senior curator for Creative Time, the public arts organization in New York, and as a curator of international art at the Tate Modern in London. Until February, she was the director of Barcelona’s contemporary art museum, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).
In a statement, David Green OBE, a founder and chair of Zeitz MOCAA, said that Dyangani Ose’s appointment “reflects who we are as an institution — one rooted in Africa, while connected to the world.”
The museum’s other founder and chair, Jochen Zeitz, the German businessman and former Puma chief executive — for whom the museum is named — said in the statement that he felt that Dyangani Ose’s experience would build on the foundations laid in the museum’s first decade, as well as “expand the museum’s artistic ambition — across exhibitions, research, collections, public engagement and the way we work with artists and audiences.”
On Oct. 1, Dyangani Ose will step into the position formerly held by Kouoh, who arrived at Zeitz MOCAA in 2019. Beloved by her colleagues and staff, Kouoh is widely credited with stabilizing a troubled institution and building programs that sought to bridge deeply entrenched social and class divisions in Cape Town.
“The museum was in crisis when Koyo came on, subsequently compounded by the pandemic,” Storm Janse van Rensburg, who was then a senior curator at Zeitz MOCAA, said in a 2023 interview with The New York Times. “The urgency was to brought bring it back to life.” She is largely credited with doing so. (When Kouoh died in May 2025, she was also serving as curator and artistic director for the 2026 Venice Biennale.)
Dyangani Ose, who was born in Spain into a family of Equatorial Guinean descent, was appointed in January as the artistic director of the second edition of the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, which will open Oct. 23. Before leading MACBA in Barcelona, she directed London’s Showroom, a nonprofit gallery focused on social practice art.
She has curated exhibitions of the work of Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems, Zanele Muholi, Betye Saar, Bouchra Khalili and the Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi. In 2006, while a curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, a contemporary art museum in the Canary Islands, Spain, she co-curated an exhibition of 14 emerging South African artists.
Dyangani Ose was also one of the curators of “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica,” a major survey that opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024 and subsequently traveled. She is currently enrolled in the doctoral program in art history at Cornell University.
In an email, Dyangani Ose said that she was taking up Kouoh’s ambition of making Zeitz MOCAA a “publicly engaged, Pan-African museum.” She added, “It will do so by building a network equal to one question: what does the continent need from its cultural institutions, and what must those institutions dare to become?”
Calling Cape Town “a city of contradictions,” Dyangani Ose said that “this museum is and must continue to be a public institution. A truly public institution—one that merits the designation—is accountable to its public in the deepest sense,” she continued.
Her philosophy aligns with that of Kouoh, who implemented a variety of programs, including a residency for Cape Town artists, that were designed to connect to a city marked by class segregation, especially among museum audiences.
Dyangani Ose was a member of the jury appointed by Kouoh for “In Minor Keys,” the international art exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Just weeks before the show opened in May, the jury decided that it exclude from awards consideration artists from countries whose leaders were being tried for crimes against humanities by the International Criminal Court, a decision that would have affected artists from Israel and Russia.
After objections to the move, the jury resigned en masse just nine days before the exhibition opened.
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