Ana SALAZAR HERRERA

Profile

Born in 1990 in Paris. Lives and works in Riyadh. Graduated with an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2016. Ecuadorian and Portuguese curator exploring nomadic, polylinguistic, and transcultural subjectivities. Ana co-founded the Museum for the Displaced (2019–ongoing), a platform addressing migration and cultural resistance, and leads the research project transequatorial (2026–ongoing). 

Recent exhibitions and activities
2025 “Currents of Restitution: Abolishing the Museum,” Hangar, Lisbon
2024 “After Rain”, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh
2023 “Emancipation of the Living”, Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon, and Galeria Municipal de Arte, Almada
2022 “Now that we found freedom what are we gonna do with it?”, Hangar, Lisbon
2022 “Seats in the Abandoned Theatre”, Listening Room, Museum for the Displaced, Online

Awards
2021-22 Curator-in-residence, Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany
2020-21 Mentee, Project Anywhere Global Exhibition Program
2018 Curatorial Fellow, Shanghai Curators Lab, Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts and Shanghai Biennale

About curation

My curatorial work explores how contemporary art engages with histories of displacement, decolonial ecologies, and collective memory. I collaborate with artists whose practices recover ancestral knowledge, embody forms of resistance, and experiment with sound, installation, and performance as tools for spatial storytelling and historical reimagining. Recent projects have focused on territories shaped by colonial legacies and extractivist logics, such as the Amazon, Southeast Asia, and most recently, the Gulf region, where I have been researching how climate change and heritage are entangled with global capital. These territories offer insight into how cultural memory persists through embodied practices, vernacular technologies, and relational cosmologies. My curatorial methodology privileges slowness, listening, and situated research—often conducted through long-term fieldwork.