Renee Okine Odjidja is a curator and educator with an expanded practice, moving fluidly between curating, pedagogy, socially-engaged art, and advisory roles. Her work is deeply responsive to people, places and contexts. Ongoing interests include learning as a relational and embodied process, and how place shapes knowledge production and artistic practice.

Grounded in a practice-as-research approach, she positions curating and pedagogy as modes of enquiry: ways to test ideas, instigate conversations, build relationships, create exchanges, surface situated knowledge, and develop new artistic production. Her projects often unfold through collaborations that emphasize the value of the creative process as much as - and sometimes even more than - the outcomes.

Working across formal institutions and independently, she has co-curated and developed exhibitions, alternative educational programmes and projects, public events, performative interventions, and dialogues with artists, cultural workers, students, and communities. She operates within and outside traditional formats, foregrounding lived, networked, and context-specific knowledges and practices.

Research interests

How place and rootedness shape artistic practice and education

Learning as an embodied, situated and dialogic process

How people or institutions connect to foster spaces for meaningful exchange and collaboration

Curatorial approaches, artistic production, and educational models from the Global South

Work History

Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London (2021 - ongoing)

Renee is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, teaching on BA Drawing - a course grounded in an exploration of drawing as an expanded field of practice within contemporary art leading to multidisciplinary and diverse approaches.

She has also organized Perspectives (2021-22) the Fine Art lecture series, and co-developed Knowledge-Exchange projects and partnerships with institutions including Autograph, Bold Tendencies, Drawing Room, South London Gallery and British Council Venice Biennale Fellowships.  

Other teaching (2015 - ongoing)

Using case studies from her practice, Renee has guest-lectured on postgraduate courses on Curating, Fine Art, Education at Camberwell, Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, London Metropolitan and London South Bank universities.

Whitechapel Gallery (2014 - 21)

Swarovski Foundation Curator: Youth Programmes (2016–21)

Curator: Community Programmes (2016-17)

Renee curated and developed commissions, exhibitions, participatory projects, workshops, events, and professional development initiatives for&with 15–24 year olds and local adult audiences.

A core part of her role was developing the Gallery’s youth collective, Duchamp & Sons: a group of thirty members aged 15-21 who meet at the Gallery regularly to develop collaborative projects, events and exhibitions with artists, curators and practitioners from other fields. This programme focused on collaboration, co-creation and exchange, increasingly taking up space within the institution and challenging what a youth programme could be. This earned her an Engage Marsh Award for Excellence in Gallery Education in 2019. She also developed D&S partnership projects with institutions including Tate, Siobhan Davies Studios and English National Opera.

She co-led the Gallery’s professional development courses for industry peers on How to Curate a Youth Programme (2017 & 18) and How to Curate with Communities with MIMA (2019). She has spoken on engagement and programming at events including Norwegian Museums Association’s Seminar, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Norway and The Studio Accra, Ghana.

Advisory work (2016 - ongoing)

Renee currently serves on Drawing Room’s advisory board. Previous advisory work include Bank of America’s The State of the Arts Round Table; Freelands Foundation and The Runnymede Trust’s Visualise Report; Contemporary African Art loans and acquisitions; Genesis Foundation Kickstart Fund and Turner Contemporary’s O Dreamland Creative Estuary Commission.