Francesca Amé Koyo Kouoh is the new director of the Visual Arts section of the Venice Biennale: she will be the first African woman in this role to curate the 61st International Art Exhibition in 2026. This was decided by the Biennale's BoD, following a proposal by President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. Kouoh, 56, born in Cameroon and raised in Switzerland, has been Executive Director and Chief Curator of the prestigious Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, for the past five years. "With her here in Venice," Buttafuoco said, “La Biennale confirms what it has been offering the world for over a century: to be the home of the future”. The appointment took Italian observers by surprise and was positively surprising abroad: Philip Oltermann, in the Guardian, was quick to praise Buttafuoco's choice, "living up to her reputation as an eccentric conservative and free-thinker, able to disprove those who expected a more nationalistic slope of the Biennale under the Meloni government". Included several times by ArtReview in its list of the hundred most influential people in the contemporary art world, Kouoh has solid studies between Switzerland and France in Business Administration and Cultural Management behind her and is polyglot (she speaks French, German, English and Italian). She honed her culture in the vibrant scene of Dakar, Senegal, in her role as art director and founder of the Raw Material Company.