The Met Appoints Oluremi C. Onabanjo as Curator of Photographs

Joining from MoMA, the scholar-curator will form exhibitions, acquisitions and analysis at a decisive second for pictures, time-based media and The Met’s future-facing programme.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has appointed Oluremi C. Onabanjo as Curator in its Department of Photographs, following a world search that unfolded over a number of months. She arrives from The Museum of Modern Art, the place she serves as The Peter Schub Curator within the Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography.

The appointment locations some of the carefully watched curatorial voices in pictures on the centre of a museum recalibrating how fashionable and modern artwork is seen, studied and linked throughout departments. At The Met, Onabanjo will lead work on exhibitions, acquisitions and scholarship in twentieth-century and modern pictures, alongside time-based media, with a specific deal with worldwide observe, particularly in Africa and Asia.

Her remit additionally consists of stewardship and interpretation of the Walther Collection, the landmark reward of greater than 6,500 images, albums and works of time-based media that considerably extends the Museum’s holdings. A serious exhibition drawn from the gathering is deliberate for 2028. Across the establishment, she is going to work with colleagues to widen the place of pictures inside a extra interconnected account of artwork historical past, one which strikes throughout geographies, mediums and durations moderately than treating them in isolation.

“Oluremi C. Onabanjo is among the most compelling voices in contemporary photography today,” mentioned Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Her scholarship and curatorial vision reflect a deep engagement with the histories of the medium and a thoughtful approach to the ways photography shapes our understanding of the world. As we look toward the future of art at The Met—including the development of the Oscar L. and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing—Onabanjo’s perspective will be invaluable in advancing a more expansive and globally connected narrative of art, fostering new dialogues across departments, cultures, and time.”

She joins the Department at a consequential second. The Museum is advancing a number of main institutional tasks, together with the Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, as a result of open in 2030. Within that broader shift, pictures is anticipated to play an more and more outstanding position in how artwork from the late nineteenth century to the current is offered all through the galleries. Her appointment alerts a bigger dedication to revising the frameworks by which current artwork historical past is informed. She will start later this summer time.

“Onabanjo brings a remarkable depth of knowledge and a rigorous approach to the study of photography,” mentioned Jeff Rosenheim, The Met’s Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. “Her work reflects a nuanced understanding of the medium’s histories and its global trajectories, as well as a strong commitment to expanding the collection in meaningful and enduring ways. We look forward to the perspectives she will bring to the Department and to the Museum as a whole.”

Onabanjo commented: “I am honored to join The Met at such a dynamic moment as it looks ahead to the future of Photography in the Museum. The Met’s extraordinary collection and its commitment to presenting art across cultures and time offer a powerful context for rethinking the histories of photography. I look forward to contributing to the Department’s work and to engaging new audiences with the medium.”

About Oluremi C. Onabanjo

Onabanjo’s curatorial observe is distinguished by its shut consideration to pictures’s social, political and aesthetic lives. Her work has been particularly attentive to the historical past of the medium throughout Africa and the African diaspora, and to the methods pictures intersects with visible tradition, data manufacturing and archival formation internationally.

She joined MoMA in 2021 as Associate Curator and, since 2024, has served as The Peter Schub Curator within the Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography. There, she has overseen a group of greater than 35,000 images spanning the medium’s historical past.

At MoMA, she has led important acquisitions that broadened the Museum’s engagement with artists and image-makers working throughout completely different contexts and traditions, together with Gabrielle Goliath, Aline Motta, Marilyn Nance, Silvia Rosi, Eslanda Robeson and Zofia Rydet. She additionally performed an vital position within the Museum’s Early Modern Working Group, which she co-chaired from 2022 to 2024, and helped combine pictures into the persevering with reinstallation of the gathering by shows comparable to A Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession, Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, The City as Spectacle and Visual Vernaculars.

Her current exhibitions and collaborations embrace New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging (2025); New Photography 2023: Kelani Abass, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Yagazie Emezi, Amanda Iheme, Abraham Oghobase, Karl Ohiri, Logo Oluwamuyiwa (2023); and Projects: Ming Smith (2023), in addition to Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, on view by 25 July 2026.

Before MoMA, Onabanjo labored on the curatorial crew for the eighth Triennial of Photography Hamburg in 2021 and served as Director of Exhibitions & Collections at The Walther Collection in New York. There, she oversaw an acquisitions, exhibitions, analysis and publications programme formed by a essential engagement with historic and modern pictures from throughout the globe.

She has taught and lectured extensively on worldwide histories of pictures, with engagements at Yale University, NYU’s Institute for Fine Arts, the University of California, Berkeley, Instituto Moreira Salles and FOAM Photography Museum. Her writing has appeared in catalogues revealed by The Art Institute of Chicago, Aperture Foundation, Jeu de Paume, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the São Paulo Bienal, amongst others. She is the creator of Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere Everywhere (2023) and editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022).

Her current distinctions embrace the inaugural Vilcek Foundation Prize for Curatorial Work (2025) and a 2024 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship. She additionally sits on the Photography Advisory Board of Istanbul Modern. Onabanjo holds a PhD in artwork historical past and a BA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African research from Columbia University, in addition to an MSc in visible, materials and museum anthropology from Oxford University.

About The Metropolitan Museum of Art Department of Photographs

The Department of Photographs at The Met is dedicated to the research, assortment and exhibition of pictures and time-based media from 1839 to the current. Established as an unbiased curatorial division in 1992, it holds greater than 90,000 works, alongside the archives of Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and James Van Der Zee.

In 2025, the Department’s holdings in late twentieth-century and modern pictures and time-based media had been considerably expanded by the acquisition of The Walther Collection. The reward consists of greater than 6,500 images, with significantly important works from Africa and Asia, in addition to associated nineteenth- and twentieth-century vernacular pictures.

About the Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art

The Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, a serious new house for The Met’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century holdings, is scheduled to open in 2030. Designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, it marks the primary time a lady has designed a brand new wing within the Museum’s 154-year historical past.

Drawing on The Met’s architectural vary, its assortment and its setting inside Central Park, the brand new wing is conceived as each an extension of the Museum and an architectural assertion in its personal proper. It will stay throughout the footprint of the present 123,000-square-foot constructing and can rise no greater than the unique peak of the 1880 wing on the centre of the Museum complicated. Gallery house will improve by almost 50 per cent, creating new hyperlinks throughout a group that spans 5,000 years of artwork.

The venture can be supposed to handle accessibility, infrastructure and sustainability, with new areas for works of various scale and media, outside areas and expanded instructional and neighborhood programming. Construction is anticipated to start in 2026 and is projected to generate 4,000 union jobs, with a goal of 30 to 40 per cent participation by minority- and women-owned companies.

About The Met

Founded in 1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was established by American residents who sought to create a museum that may deliver artwork and artwork schooling to the general public. Today, it presents tens of hundreds of objects spanning 5,000 years of artwork from world wide throughout two websites in New York City, The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters, whereas additionally reaching an enormous on-line viewers.

From its inception, The Met has aimed to be greater than a repository of uncommon objects. Through its galleries, exhibitions and public programme, it continues to border artwork as a residing subject of concepts, formed by historical past and renewed by encounters throughout time and cultures.

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