Simon Njami

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Simon Njami, born in 1962 in Lausanne, Switzerland, is a writer, independent curator, lecturer, art critic and essayist. He published several novels in the 1980s, including Cercueil et Cie (1985), Les Enfants de la Cité (1987), and Les Clandestins and African Gigolo (1989). He has written biographies of James Baldwin and Léopold Sédar Senghor, plus other short texts and scripts for cinema and documentaries.

Njami co-founded Revue Noire, a journal about contemporary African and non-Western art, and he was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego. After creating the Ethnicolor Festival in Paris in 1987, he curated many international exhibitions and helped bring African contemporary art to global stages. He served as artistic director of Bamako Encounters, the African Photography Biennale, from 2001 to 2007.

He curated Africa Remix (2004–2007), shown in Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm and Johannesburg. He co-curated the first African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and organized the first African Art Fair in Johannesburg in 2008. He was artistic director of the Luanda Triennale (2010), Picha in Lubumbashi (2010) and SUD Douala Triennale (2010), among other events.

Njami’s The Divine Comedy – Heaven, Hell, Purgatory by Contemporary African Artists was shown at MMK Frankfurt in 2014, at the SCAD Museum of Art in 2015, and at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, in 2015. He directed Dak’art, the Dakar Biennale, in 2016 and 2017, and he curated Afriques Capitales in Paris and Lille in 2017.

He currently runs AtWork, a traveling and digital project with Lettera27 Foundation and Moleskine, and the Pan African Master Classes in Photography with the Goethe Institute. He is the art adviser of the Sindika Dokolo Foundation (Luanda) and the artistic director of the Donwahi Foundation (Abidjan), as well as a member of several museum boards.

Njami has served on many art prizes juries, including World Press Photo. He judged the Edvard Munch Art Award in 2019 (Lawrence Abu Hamdan) and the Future Generation Art Prize in 2023 (Ashfika Rahman). In 2023 he briefly joined a six-person search committee for Documenta’s 2027 edition but resigned.