Claire Tancons
Lives and works in New Orleans (United States).
Claire Tancons is a curator and scholar invested in the postcolonial discourse and practice of the politics of production and exhibition with a focus on performance. Tancons has charted a distinct curatorial and scholarly path in performance, inflecting global art historical genealogies with African diasporic aesthetics as well as decentring and othering curatorial methodologies as part of a wider reflection on global conditions of cultural production.
Recent curatorial highlights include Tide by Side, the opening ceremony of Faena Art’s Miami Beach district (2016); Up Hill Down Hall, a BMW Tate Live commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2014) ; and En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (with Krista Thompson) organised and presented by Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and co-organised as a travelling exhibition by Independent Curators International, New York.
Over the last decade, she has curated for established and emerging international biennials such as Gwangju Biennale (2008), Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008), Cape Town Biennial (2009), Biennale Bénin (2012) and the Göteborg Biennial (2013). She is currently a curator for Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019). Tancons’ independent vision has been supported by a Prince Claus Fund Artistic Production Grant (2009), two Curatorial Research Fellowships from the Foundation for Art Initiatives (2007, 2009) an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship (2008) and an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2012). In 2016, she was selected by Artsy as "One of the 20 most influential young curators in the US".
Tancons holds an MA in Museum Studies from École du Louvre, Paris (1999) and an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2000). She is also a former Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York (2001).
