Oluremi C. Onabanjo

Oluremi C. Onabanjo was appointed the Peter Schub Curator in the Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography in 2024, having joined the Museum as Associate Curator in 2021. Responsible for managing MoMA’s holdings of over 35,000 photographs, she is deeply involved in the ongoing reinstallation of the Museum’s collection. Her research engages internationalist histories of photography in the Atlantic world, resulting in key acquisitions for MoMA’s collection and contributions to its ongoing program. Recent exhibitions and collaborations include Visual Vernaculars (2023–25), Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage (2023–24), Projects: Ming Smith (2023), and New Photography 2023 (2023).

Onabanjo was the inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Prize for Curatorial Work (2025) and a 2024 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. She sits on the Photography Advisory Board of the Istanbul Modern. Prior to joining the Museum, Onabanjo was Director of Exhibitions and Collections of the Walther Collection and served on the curatorial team of the eighth edition of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2021). She is the author of Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere Everywhere (2023) and the editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022). Onabanjo 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.

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