Oluremi C. Onabanjo is a curator and historian of photography. She is The Peter Schub Curator in The Robert B. Menschel Department of The Museum of Modern Art, where she manages its holdings of over 35,000 photographs spanning the history of the medium. Recent exhibitions include Ernest Cole's House of Bondage, Projects: Ming Smith, and New Photography 2023. Currently on view is Visual Vernaculars.
The inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Prize in Curatorial Work, Onabanjo was a 2024 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and the 2023 recipient of the Cisneros Institute Research Grant. She is a core member of the C-MAP Africa Research Group and sits on the Photography Advisory Board for the Istanbul Modern. Previously, Onabanjo worked as Director of Exhibitions and Collections of The Walther Collection and served on the curatorial team of the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022).
A 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grantee, Onabanjo is the editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022) and author of Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (2023). She holds a PhD in Art History and a BA in African Studies from Columbia University, and an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University.
Image: Standing with Simone Leigh's Sentinel in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at The Museum of Modern Art © Lelanie Foster, 2024.