Big news out of the art world: Swiss-Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh has been named the new artistic director of the 2026 Venice Biennale. The announcement is historic, as Kouoh will be the first African woman to head the event, and only the second African-born person to do so, after Okwui Enwezor, who curated the 2015 iteration.

As the executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town since 2019, Kouoh’s work is focused on in-depth solo shows by African artists. She has also written a number of books about African art, most recently When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, published in 2023 to accompany a MOCAA exhibit about Black figuration and portraiture. In addition to this, Kouoh was a curator of educational and artistic programme at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York.

In recent years, the Venice Biennale (often called the “Olympics of the art world”) has been criticized for featuring primarily European and American artists and excluding art from other parts of the world, which makes Kouoh’s appointment particularly interesting. In fact, it’s being seen as a push away from past years’ Eurocentrism thanks to her focus on pan-African art. And it seems she’s seeing it the same way. In a statement, Kouoh says she is honoured and privileged to organize an exhibition that she hopes “will carry meaning for the world we currently live in—and most importantly, for the world we want to make.”