Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker

Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker is a curator, scholar and former Director and CEO of the 21st and 22nd Biennale of Sydney. During her tenure as Director of Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum Villa Stuck Munich and Frye Art Museum Seattle, Birnie-Danzkercommissioned and conceived - alone and in curatorial collectives with artists, poets, scholars and citizen curators – numerous exhibitions on the history and present of the modern. Large-scale exhibitions included Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945 (cocurated with Ken Lum and Zheng Shengtian); Art of Tomorrow (cocurated with Brigitte Salmen and Karole Vail for Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York); and The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, curated by Okwui Enwezor (for which Birnie-Danzker served as Exhibition Director) which toured to Gropius Bau Berlin, MCA Chicago and MoMA PS1 New York.  In 2021-23, she served as Advisor to the 34th and 35th Ljubljana Biennial and, in 2021, Visiting Scholar to the School of Philosophy, Fudan University Shanghai, where she led a Masterclass on Curatorial Practice. In 2025, Birnie-Danzker served as curator advisor for the monumental reinterpretation of Shanghai Modern at China Art Museum Shanghai (curator: Xiang Liping), and was nominated with Inuk artist, poet and curator, Taqralik Partridge, and Inuit Art Quarterly, for a National Magazine Award for their collaborative visual essay Qikiqtaaluk ᕿᑭᖅᑖᓗᒃ Baffin Island 1913–14.