Yesomi Umolu

Yesomi Umolu (born 1983 or 1984) is a British curator of contemporary art and writer who has been director of curatorial affairs and public practice for the Serpentine Galleries since 2020.

Umolu previously held curatorial positions at the Walker Art Center, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, and the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. She then served as artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019 before assuming her current position at the Serpentine Galleries.

Umolu has published works in publications such as Art in America and Afterimage, and has written and spoken on issues surrounding diversity and structural racism in museums.

Early life and education Yesomi Umolu was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. Her mother taught English and her father was a civil servant. She moved to London at the age of ten. As a teenager, she was involved with an arts group at Tate Modern. After practising as an architect for a couple of years, Umolu pursued art curation due to an interest in the "discourse and social relations that the built environment generates". There, she organised the first solo U.S. exhibition for artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, titled The Museum of Non Participation: The New Deal, and worked on various other exhibitions. In a review of the exhibition for Hyperallergic, art critic Sarah Rose Sharp stated that "Umolu has done an impressive job of transporting the objects and the artists of Africa here to Michigan, where, in exchange, they can transport us back to Africa." The following year, in 2016, she was awarded a curatorial fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Her 2018 exhibition Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip, curated with Katja Rivera, was named one of the top 20 U.S. exhibitions of the year by Hyperallergic. As artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, Umolu worked alongside co-curators Sepake Angiama and Paulo Tavares Architectural Record remarked that the biennial's programming offered "incisive critiques of how architecture and design work within systems of power, racism, colonialism, and inequality" and noted the greater integration of exhibitions into the city compared to previous biennials.

Umolu was named director of curatorial affairs and public practice for the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2020. Her responsibilities in this position include improving the inclusivity and accessibility of the Serpentine's programming.

Writing Umolu's writing has appeared in various journals including Art in America and Afterimage.