New Curators announces the 11 fellows who will take part in the first year of its curatorial training programme. Selected from over 1200 applicants from around the world, the group began the year-long programme on 11 September 2023.
New Curators offers individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds a paid, 12-month long curatorial training programme based in London. For the first edition of New Curators, the cohort will be based at South London Gallery.
Offering a combination of academic seminars, skills training and network development, in conjunction with robust coaching and mentorship, New Curators removes the financial barriers to the curatorial profession, paying every fellow the London Living Wage for the duration of the programme.
Though based in London, the fellows will be given access to an extensive international network of museums, galleries and artist-run spaces, including Artangel, London; A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Turner Contemporary, Margate; and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.
FELLOWS
Felix Choong (he/him)
Born 1995, London, UK
Lives in London, UK
With a BA in History and American Studies from the University of Sussex, Felix Choong has since worked in both the art and fashion sectors, with a curatorial practice that seeks to explore and develop their intersections. Previous exhibitions include Homesick for Another World (2020) and Knock Knock (2022), which are accompanied by the exhibition catalogue and critical journal Nice Outfit Felix launched in 2021. Nice Outfit seeks to connect exhibition-making to other disciplines by inviting practitioners to respond to the exhibition’s main themes in any way they see fit, creating a space for transgressive study and dynamic conversation.
Carol Bedoy (she/they)
Born 1998, Chicago, USA
Lives in Aguascalientes, Mexico and Chicago, USA
Carol Bedoy is a curator and artist whose curatorship foregrounds misunderstood and underrepresented artists that urgently need the agency of being portrayed in a light that they wish to be shown in. As a daughter of Mexican-American immigrants, Carol believes representation is vital to one’s sense of belonging and is more complicated than where one resides. Constantly rotating between Chicago and Aguascalientes, Carol creates exhibitions in the hope of creating bonds between audiences and artists who previously had no common ground. Carol graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Nikita Sena (she/her)
Born 1994, London, UK
Lives in London, UK
Nikita Sena is a writer and researcher based in London, by way of Ghana. She has a background in human rights and is interested in the role of art and creative practices in revealing both the nature of oppression and routes to liberation. Her work has appeared in gal-dem, Bad Form, Untitled: Voices and EYESORE. As a curatorial resident at be’kech, a former community workspace in Berlin, Nikita facilitated workshops that used collage and painting to explore socio-political issues. She has also co-curated an online event with Autograph ABP London on artivism and transnational solidarity. Nikita’s dream is to create spaces that reject the tyranny of oppression, alienation, and inertia so that we can instead be submerged in pleasure, experimentation, and the possibility of poetic revolution.
Aditi Kapoor (she/they)
Born 2001, Delhi, India
Lives in New York, USA
Aditi Kapoor is a writer and curator currently based between Delhi, New York and London. With specific interests in new media art and contemporary media theory, her oeuvre particularly explores the intersections between video art, simulacra and technology. She is invested in exploring the juxtaposition of artistic modalities to augment immersion, and the re-imagination of art spaces as architecture to form and hold communities. In the recent past, Aditi has worked for Montez Press Radio, ISCP: International Studio and Curatorial Program, and the Publications department at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her visual work has been exhibited at The Douglas Hyde Gallery (2021, Dublin), Barnard College (2022, NY), and published by the Guggenheim Museum (2022, NY). Her writing has featured in the Journal of Art Criticism, Ratrock, TN2 Magazine, among others. She holds a Dual BA in English and Film from Columbia University and Trinity College Dublin.
Rosie Fitter (she/her)
Born 1999, Norfolk, UK
Lives in London, UK
Rosie Fitter is an art historian and writer based in London, originally from Norfolk. She has always been interested in the potential and influence of curation in rural areas and worked at the GroundWork gallery in Kings Lynn, a gallery focussing on environmental sustainability and educational outreach programmes. She believes that curatorial practice should be an act of activism and resistance, causing disruption and challenging socio-political rules, and is keen to create space with and for communities to combat isolationist strategies and social alienation. Rosie graduated from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2020 and has since gained experience working in galleries including Nicoletti Contemporary and Almine Rech, where she has worked in the press and communications department since 2022. She has also written for a variety of publications and within galleries, working as an arts journalist as well as copywriting and editing.
Lemeeze Davids (she/they)
Born 1995, Johannesburg, South Africa
Lives in Cape Town, South Africa
Lemeeze Davids is a curator, poet and artist, interested in the mythology of everyday lives, practices of accessibility, and sustainable care. Lemeeze completed her BFA at Stellenbosch University and BA Hons in Curatorship at the University of Cape Town, focusing on food and dining as an experimental curatorial model. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the Pan-African ABSA’s L’atelier prize, and has published poetry with magazines, such as New Contrast and ITCH, as well as UK-based erbacce-press. She has participated in and worked on exhibitions at blank projects, Zeitz MOCAA, Stevenson, GUS Gallery, Under Projects, and Iziko South African Museum.
Rey Londres (they/them)
Born 1999, Holguin, Cuba
Lives in New York, USA
While completing a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design, Rey Londres founded and co-curated the first edition of The Black Biennial in 2022. This exhibition highlighted work by 83 Black artists, including students, alumni, and local artists from the Providence community. As a curator, Rey is committed to creating spaces that challenge systems of power and foster mutual understanding, cultural empowerment, and ethical pedagogy. They bring a community-based approach to exhibition-making that prioritises collaboration and accessibility. Londres recently completed a curatorial internship at The Studio Museum in Harlem, conducting research on the permanent collection and for their exhibition programme.
Amandine Vabre Chau (she/her)
Born 1998, Paris, France
Lives in Bussy-Saint-Georges, France
Amandine Vabre Chau is a French-Hongkonger curator working across themes of heritage, displacement, and diaspora. Interested in cross-examining these identity structures to create new pathways of understanding, she seeks tobroaden experiences of collaboration, care and community building. This led her to curate Between Trenches, a group exhibition exploring home, belonging, and migration at OPENing Gallery, The Koppel Project, London, in 2023. Sensitive to Asian and Asian Diaspora practices, she recently worked for Asian Contemporary Art, France. Amandine obtained her BA Fine Arts with honours from the Paris Cergy National Graduate School of Art in 2022.
Courtney Brown (she/they)
Born 2000, Chicago, USA
Lives in New York, USA
Courtney Zoa Brown is a curator, cultural facilitator and artist from the West Side of Chicago. They studied Art History and Africana Studies at Oberlin College with a concentration in contemporary African Diasporic art. Their curatorial practice focuses on decolonial, international community engagement as well as art accessibility and inclusion. In their archival practice of writing, photography, and collaging they explore diasporic ideas of displacement, memory, and domesticity. They have worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Arts Council, and curated a virtual exhibition with Jip Gallery, Through the Loop: Chicago’s Youth Artist Revolution which explored themes of displacement, activism, and positionality within Chicago’s underground youth artist scene. With New Curators, Courtney aspires to bridge the institutional gap between contemporary artists and audiences of colour through facilitating intentional art educational and conversational experiences.
Makella Ama (she/they)
Born 1998, Accra, Ghana
Lives in London, UK
Makella Ama is an interdisciplinary curator and artist navigating life as a seasonal archivist, part-time-poet, and full-timelover-of-art. Outside their background in community/youth work, Makella’s writing has been published in TOIL – Unearthing Abolition, a publication in collaboration with the Museum of London and Languid Hands. They also recently co-curated the 2023 Chronic Youth Film Festival at Barbican. Makella’s creative work is often experimental and takes shape through mixed media pieces, poetry, prose, and film. Makella has a vested interest in exploring the intersections between storytelling and history and this is something they try to incorporate into their curatorial practice.
Lucia Jurikova (she/her)
Born 1993, Cadca, Slovakia
Lives in London, UK
Lucia Jurikova graduated from the University of Sussex with a BA in Art History with Business and Management Studies in 2021. In her academic writings, Lucia has explored notions of art communities, gentrification, and transnationalism. Since 2019, she has focussed on emerging and underrepresented artists, working with Blacklisted Galleries, Queen Mary University, UCL and LGBTQ+ communities on 26 art exhibitions exploring mental health, inclusion, and equality. In 2022, she curated a non-binary and female-only sculpture group exhibition Body Unbound exploring metaphors of the human body; Sam MacInnes’s solo exhibition investigating British drinking culture; and Jofre Hall’s solo show commenting on the ongoing housing crisis in London. In 2023, Lucia launched IMPART CONTEMPORARY, a creative network of Eastern and Western European artists, which aims to foster international experience, collaboration and cultural exchange.