Rita Ouédraogo is an Amsterdam-based curator, researcher, and writer working at the intersection of arts and design and critical research. She is interested in the liminal space between inherited histories and imagined futures. How we come to see ourselves and each other, and how that seeing opens onto freedom.
Her practice develops through (public) writing, experimental and collaborative projects, and public programmes addressing colonial afterlives, the African diaspora, archival praxis, institutional power, and popular culture, with a justice-oriented agenda.
Drawing on Black feminist pedagogies and memory work, she amplifies narratives of marginalized publics through archives, critical pedagogies, and collaborative methodologies that operate both within and beyond exhibition spaces. Grounded in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc, University of Amsterdam), she examines how cooperation and solidarity function across power differentials within 'decolonial' frameworks. Her current research focuses on collecting practices and their entanglement with questions of power, access, and institutional transformation.
She is the co-founding curator of Buro Stedelijk, the project space of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, which she established and led from 2022 to 2025. She is also Chair of the Mondriaan Fund of the Netherlands. As a writer, she has contributed to numerous academic and art publications.
Previously, she served as Research Programmer and (Community) Collaboration Officer at the Research Center for Material Culture (Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, Leiden and Rotterdam), curator at Framer Framed, and co-curator of the Hartwig Art Foundation Special Project (2020–2021).