Elvira Dyangani Ose to Lead Zeitz MOCAA After Koyo Kouoh

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town has appointed Elvira Dyangani Ose as its new artistic director, succeeding Koyo Kouoh, who led the museum from 2019 until her death, aged 57, in May 2025.

Dyangani Ose will take up the role on 1 October following an international search. She arrives at a museum still negotiating the loss of a director who, over six years, became closely identified with both its programme and its growing prominence beyond South Africa.

Dyangani Ose will not, however, inherit Kouoh's position in its previous form. Zeitz MOCAA is dividing the former executive director and chief curator role between an artistic director and an operational director, with the latter appointment still to be announced. Kouoh had been involved in developing the succession plan before her death, according to the museum's co-founder and co-chair David Green.

Kouoh joined Zeitz MOCAA two years after the museum opened in 2017. During her tenure, she shifted its programme towards exhibitions grounded in African and diasporic art histories. Among the most ambitious was When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, co-curated with Tandazani Dhlakama, which brought together nearly 200 works from artists including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Michael Armitage and Amy Sherald before travelling to museums in Europe and the United States.

Her influence extended beyond Cape Town. At the time of her death, Kouoh was preparing In Minor Keys, the 61st Venice Biennale, becoming the first African woman appointed to curate its main exhibition. The Biennale proceeded according to the plans she had left behind, opening posthumously in May this year.

Dyangani Ose comes to Cape Town after five years as director of MACBA in Barcelona and is currently artistic director of the second Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial. Born in Córdoba, Spain, to Equatoguinean parents, she has worked extensively on modern and contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Previous roles include director and chief curator of The Showroom in London, senior curator at Creative Time in New York and curator of international art at Tate.

More recently, she co-curated Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024. She also has a history of working with artists in South Africa: in 2006, while at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, she co-organised Olvida Quien Soy / Erase from Who I Am, bringing together work by 14 emerging South African artists.

“Under the leadership of Koyo, this museum has become a Pan-African museum on the global stage,” Dyangani Ose said. “For me, this is not just a professional step forward, but a personal and deeply emotive commitment.”