Cape Town's Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa has named its next artistic director, and the choice signals both continuity and a widening of horizons. Elvira Dyangani Ose, a curator whose career has moved fluidly between Africa, Europe and the Americas, will step into the role on 1 October 2026, arriving at a moment when the museum is approaching its tenth anniversary and looking ahead to its second decade.

The appointment follows an extensive local and international search, and the board has been explicit that her mandate is to carry the institution into its next chapter — building on the curatorial foundations already in place while charting new ground of her own.

Dyangani Ose arrives with an unusually broad institutional résumé. She served as director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) from 2021 until earlier this year, stepping down after the museum's board determined that her simultaneous role as artistic director of the second Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial — a post she still holds, running through 2027 — conflicted with her commitments in Barcelona.

Before Barcelona, she led The Showroom in London as director and chief curator, held a senior curatorial post at Creative Time in New York, and worked as curator of international art at Tate Modern, where she helped shape the museum's first formal strategy for collecting art from Africa and its diaspora. Earlier still, she curated at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Gran Canaria. She has also sat on international juries, including the Golden Lion committee at this year's Venice Biennale, and serves on the board of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art.

That trajectory — anchored in African and diasporic art history but tested across some of Europe and America's most prominent institutions — is precisely what Zeitz MOCAA's board pointed to in announcing her appointment. Museum co-founder and co-chair David Green framed the choice as reflective of the institution's own identity: rooted in Africa, but connected to the world.

As artistic director, Dyangani Ose will oversee Zeitz MOCAA's curatorial vision and programming direction. She takes charge of an institution that has, since opening in a converted grain silo on the V&A Waterfront in 2017, positioned itself as the world's largest museum dedicated to contemporary African art — a status built on the strength of its permanent collection, its rotating exhibitions of both established and emerging artists, and its public and educational programming.

Her appointment has not been without scrutiny. Some commentary following the announcement has raised questions about why the board's search did not surface a South African candidate for the role, a conversation likely to continue as Dyangani Ose settles into the position. For now, the museum has a new artistic director with a genuinely pan-African and international profile, and an institution on the cusp of its second decade waiting to see what shape that vision will take.

Dyangani Ose has described the appointment as both a professional milestone and a personal one, expressing that she sees it as a privilege to continue Zeitz MOCAA's work as a leading African institution with global reach.