Curator and scholar Oluremi C. Onabanjo receives the Vilcek Prize in Curatorial Work for her work to examine the power, position and production of Blackness in relation to the unfinished global history of the photographic medium. 

Onabanjo is the Peter Schub Curator of Photography with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her academic pursuits have equipped her with a robust intellectual framework, informing her curatorial practices and contributions to the fields of photography and the arts of the Black and African diaspora.

Since joining MoMA in 2021, Onabanjo has organized several exhibitions: In partnership with The Studio Museum in Harlem, she led the development of Projects: Ming Smith and produced the accompanying publication, Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere. She also led the curation and development of New Photography: 2023. 

In New Photography: 2023 Onabanjo brought focus to work by international photographers with links to Lagos (Èkó), Nigeria, whose work moves beyond documentation and into the function of photography as a social medium. Her masterful curation highlights the relationships that the medium fosters: between photographer and subject, between photographer and the viewer and between subject and viewer. 

Onabanjo’s curatorial expertise and scholarly approach is evident by her work on Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022), which draws on the more than 1,500 images created by photographer Marilyn Nance at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Nigeria in 1977 (FESTAC 77). Last Day in Lagos is a testament both to the indelible cultural and intellectual impact of FESTAC, and to Nance’s pioneering work in photography in the Black diaspora: Onabanjo expertly weaves these two threads together throughout the book. In December 2025, Onabanjo’s exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraits and Political Imagination is set to open at MoMA, where it will be on view through April 2026. The exhibition will be accompanied by a full catalog.

Awards & Accomplishments

Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow (2024)
Cisneros Institute Curatorial Research Grant (2022)
Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2020)
Member, C-MAP Africa Research Group