Thuli Mlambo-James
Biography
Thuli Mlambo-James is a curator with over a decade of experience spanning contemporary art, institutional leadership, and environmental advocacy. Her curatorial practice centres on radical care and ecological urgency.
From 2017 to 2018, she became the first Black woman to direct Johannesburg’s historic Bag Factory Artist Studios. There, she implemented equity policies that boosted women-led residencies by 60% and significantly increased media visibility, while forging connections between South African artists and global peers. This role solidified her belief in the power of institutions to drive systemic change.
In 2022–2023, she completed academic training in Curatorial Practice and Visual Cultures at NODE Center in Berlin, focusing on transnational feminist curation. That same year, she led a collective that won the bid to represent South Africa at the 59th Venice Biennale, co-curating the national pavilion.
In 2024, her curatorial work with EIGEN + ART, which debuted at the Cape Town Art Fair, culminated in Berlin with a bold all-women South African exhibition. It explored pleasure and selfhood as radical acts amid climate precarity, challenging Eurocentric narratives and asserting bodily autonomy in the context of ecological crisis.
She serves as Curatorial Program Developer for Water for the Future, an environmental NGO working along Johannesburg’s Jukskei River. She curates projects that engage artists exploring feminism, environmentalism, urban ecology, and hybrid environments, interrogating the shifting boundaries between nature, artifice, and human impact.
Since 2022, she has served on the jury for Apexart Gallery in New York, evaluating international exhibition proposals. She is also a scholarship recipient of The Black Heart Foundation and Black Blossoms School of Art & Culture (UK), where she is completing a Certificate in Reframing Blackness – Reshaping Art History, focused on accessibility, representation, and the portrayal of Black figures in Western art.
Thuli Mlambo-James, Curatorial Program Developer at Water For The Future in Johannesburg, South Africa, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation.