NEW YORK, NY.- Performa, the internationally acclaimed organization dedicated to live performance across disciplines, announced the appointment of Performa curator Adrienne Edwards as Curator at Large, Visual Arts, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The news was made public today in a press release from the Walker. Based in New York, Adrienne will continue to occupy her senior role at Performa as curator and the head of programming at the Performa Institute, contributing to the year round programming and research initiatives of the organization. Please join us in congratulating Adrienne on her new role.

“We are delighted for this new opportunity to share expertise across our two institutions and explore new partnership models. Adrienne has been with Performa for six of its ten years, acquiring the unique expertise in curating that Performa has pioneered, which is equal parts curator and producer. We are thrilled that she will be working with the Walker Art Center team to build on the Walker’s important history of interdisciplinary exhibitions, and to add her scholarship and unique vision to their program for the future,” said RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator of Performa.

As Curator at Large, Visual Arts, at the Walker, Edwards brings her extensive background in groundbreaking contemporary performance-based and visual arts practice. Her unique experience serves as a model for innovative approaches to curating commissioning, developing, and presenting the work of interdisciplinary artists working in a variety of mediums. Edwards will work within the Walker’s visual arts department to develop and implement artist projects and exhibitions, and expand interdisciplinary scholarship and research while making key contributions to the Walker's acquisitions planning. She joins the staff in April 2016 and will split her time between New York City and Minneapolis to serve both curatorial positions.

Adrienne Edwards is a PhD candidate in performance studies at New York University and Curator at Performa, where since 2010 she has contributed to the year-round programming of the organization, to the Performa Institute, the Performa biennial, and to Performa’s institutional collaborations with the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Her curatorial work includes a focus on artists of the African Diaspora and the Global South, including a recent Curatorial Fellowship awarded to Performa for Research supported by the Warhol Foundation to research approaches to experimentation in interdisciplinary art in Africa. For Performa Edwards has curated programs, projects, and productions with a wide range of artists including Performa Commissions by Edgar Arceneaux, Juliana Huxtable, Rashid Johnson, and Laura Lima, in addition to projects and productions by Ralph Lemon, Senga Nengudi, Lo rraine O’Grady, Adam Pendleton, Dave McKenzie, and Carrie Mae Weems. Recent projects have included organizing and co-organizing Fluxus founding member Benjamin Patterson’s first retrospective concert Action as Composition (2013) and Pope.L’s Cage Unrequited (2013) for Performa 13, and Jonathas de Andrade’s A Study of Race and Class – Bahia >< New York (2015) and Chimurenga’s Library for Performa 15.