Marie-Ann Yemsi

Marie-Ann Yemsi is a curator and contemporary art consultant who has been director of the Villa Arson art centre in Nice, France, since September 2024. With a degree in political science, Yemsi pays particular attention to theoretical, critical, and aesthetic productions in the Global South and develops multidisciplinary art programs at the intersection of the visual arts, performance, dance, music, and writing. Her projects focus on collaborative art practices and experimental forms, highlighting themes such as memory, history, gender, and identity in relation to contemporary political, social, and ecological issues.

She has organized numerous international exhibitions including, most recently, the group exhibition Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Grada Kilomba’s A World of Illusions, at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa. She was a recipient of the Villa Albertine, a prestigious French program of residencies in the United States, in 2025, and in 2026 she will present an exhibition and a publication resulting from her research and work with contemporary artists in the archives of The Afro, one of the oldest and most important African American newspapers, conserved in Baltimore. [Source: MOMENTA, 2025]