Michelle Mlati

Biography

Michelle Mlati (b. 1993 South Africa) is a curator and researcher currently dedicating part of her time as a curatorial assistant at Palazzo Grassi/Pinault Collection for an upcoming 2026 exhibition. She has a BA Honours in Curatorship (2015) from the University of Cape Town and an MSc in Human Settlements from KU Leuven (2020) in Belgium, specializing in Art and Architecture. Her work centers on creating intersections between art, architectural and urban design practice through an intersectional environmentalist lens of practices from the 1960s to the present. She is a 2023 ICI Marian Goodman Gallery Curatorial Research Fellow in honour of the late Okwui Enwezor researching The Forest and Desert School, a Sudanese literary movement influential in modern and contemporary art in the East African region, including an interview with Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.

As a curator, Michelle has worked with various artists, galleries and non-profit art spaces in East Africa and continuing independent practice experimenting with The Forest and Desert School, which she curated as a group show at Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi in 2022. She has co-authored a forthcoming chapter together with cultural manager and journalist Pablo Barrios Martínez in Plant Space: Territories, Architectures and Technologies of the Vegetal to be published by Sternberg Press and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2026, edited by Carmen Lael Hines, Adam Hudec and Michelle Howard. She curated a group show, Inceptisols: No Soil nor Sand (2023) of four artists as a resident at The Green Corridor in Brussels. She has contributed texts to the art magazines Glean, Hyperallergic and published her first curatorial work What time is it? WTII (2015) included in Afrikadaa a bilingual French and English quarterly publication dedicated to contemporary art edited by Pascale Obolo in the Museum On/Off (2017) issue 11 rethinking/reinventing museums as a form of ‘paper museum’ curated by Alicia Knock at the Centre Pompidou. This includes a podcast for Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Embodied Memory (2024) episode of the Swamplands series in conversation with Sudanese artist and architect Ola Hassanain. From 2024 to 2025 she worked as Research Associate for the artist Michael Armitage Studio researching archives and practices of modern and contemporary artists from East Africa, notably Chelenge Van Rampelberg and Peter Mulindwa amongst a younger generation of artists situated in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

She has guest lectured the series Curating Botanical Collections (2021), part of the Strategies for Art in Times of Change course convened by Dr. Portia Malatjie at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Through multiple workshops focused on ecofeminism, posthumanism, photography and activism such as at Qattan Foundation this has also informed her Masters thesis, Posthuman (Un) Settlements in Palestine: The agency of plants, technology and humans in the political ecology of the West Bank (2019) centering institutions such as The Palestinian Museum Gardens, Palestine Museum of Natural History to UNESCO heritage sites like the Landscape of Battir, a refugee camp and resident's gardens to monumental landscape parks in Ramallah. She was previously enrolled in a doctoral programme at KU Leuven, based in Brussels, from 2022 to 2024, where she researched the projects of Dutch artist and landscape designer Louis Le Roy in The Netherlands, Belgium and France and presented her findings at several conferences. This included planting projects in Amsterdam in the Bijlmermeer initiated by immigrant communities largely undervalued by academia, further connecting local and international students through field visits hosted by Wouter Pocornie working with Bijlmer Believers 3.0 and Black Archives Bijlmer through research seminars she co-organized.

Michelle Mlati, Independent Curator in Nairobi, Kenya & Pretoria, South Africa, and Curatorial Assistant, Palazzo Grassi, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation.