Photo by Orlando V Thompson

Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, where she has organized exhibitions including Stories of Resistance, Ebony G. Patterson: …when the cuts erupt…the garden rings…and the warning is a wailing…, Derek Fordjour: SHELTER, Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, Bethany Collins: Chorus, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Earwitness Theatre, Guan Xiao: Fiction Archive Project, Hayv Kahraman: Acts of Reparation, Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Re-Evolving Door to the Moundverse, and SUPERFLEX.

Prior to her position at CAM, Al-Khudhairi was the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art where she organized the first large-scale exhibition of the museum’s contemporary collection, Third Space / shifting conversations about contemporary art. The exhibition’s accompanying publication received the 2019 AAMC Curatorial Award for Excellence. Al-Khudhairi was Curator for the 6^th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan in 2017 and Co-Artistic Director for 9^th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea in 2012. Serving as the Founding Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, Al-Khudhairi oversaw the opening of the Museum in 2010 and co-curated the first presentation of the museum’s collection Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art and curated Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab.

She holds a BA in Art History from Georgia State University and an MA with Distinction from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Al-Khudhairi is the recipient of the 2021 VIA Curatorial Fellowship Grant and a fellow in the 2021 Center for Curatorial Leadership program.