About

Wassan Al-Khudhairi is a curator and writer currently based in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is part of the curatorial team for the 2025 Hawaii Triennial. Most recently, she served as the Ferring Foundation Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, where she organized exhibitions and new commissions with artists including Hajra Waheed, Dominic Chambers, Gala Porras-Kim, Martine Gutierrez, Derek Fordjour, Stephanie Syjuco, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Bethany Collins, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Guan Xiao, Hayv Kahraman, and others. She co-produced the Radio Resistance podcast, which accompanied the publication and exhibition Stories of Resistance, a thematic group exhibition featuring over 20 artists.

Al-Khudhairi was co-curator of the 6th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan (2017) and co-Artistic Director for the 9th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea (2012). As the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, she organized the museum’s first large-scale exhibition of its contemporary collection, Third Space: Shifting Conversations About Contemporary Art. She also served as the Founding Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, where she oversaw its opening in 2010. There, she co-curated Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art and curated Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab.

Al-Khudhairi holds a BA in Art History from Georgia State University and an MA in Islamic Art and Architecture with Distinction from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She is a graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute, the recipient of the 2021 VIA Curatorial Fellowship Grant, and a fellow in the 2021 Center for Curatorial Leadership program. In 2019, she received an Award for Excellence from the American Association of Museum Curators for the Third Space exhibition catalogue, and in 2020, she was honored with ArtTable’s New Leadership Award.