10×10 Research Grants on Photobook History

Anne Havinga is the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Chair of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has led the Museum’s Photography section since 2001 and has been on staff at the Museum since 1989. When Photography became its own individual curatorial department in 2016, she was named its first Chair. Among her projects, Havinga has strengthened the Museum’s photography collection in a variety of ways and played a leading role in the exceptional 2018 acquisition of the Howard Greenberg Collection. Havinga has organized a range of exhibitions at the Museum including the recent Painted Tintypes: Photography for the People (2023); Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera (2020); Postwar Visions: European Photography 1945-60 (2019); Truth and Beauty: Pictorialist Photography (2014); Photo Eye: Avant-Garde Photography in Europe (2014); and Silver, Salt, and Sunlight: Early Photography in Britain and France (2012). She co-organizer of In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3-11 (2015) together with Anne Nishimura Morse (William and Helen Pounds Senior Curator of Japanese Art, MFA Boston). In 2019, Havinga arranged for the 3-day pop-up display organized by 10×10 Photobooks titled How We See: Photobooks by Women at the MFA.

Osei Bonsu is a British-Ghanaian curator and writer based in London and Paris. He is currently a curator of International Art at Tate Modern, where he is responsible for organising exhibitions, developing the museum’s collection and broadening the representation of artists from Africa and the African diaspora. As a leading curator of contemporary art, he has advised museums, art fairs and private collections internationally and mentored emerging artists through his digital platform, Creative Africa Network. Bonsu has worked as a contributing editor for Frieze magazine and has contributed to a number of exhibition catalogues and arts publications including ArtReview, Numero Art and Vogue. Through his writing, Bonsu focuses on the relationship between art and issues of migration, race and identity in contemporary society. He has lectured widely on these subjects at various institutions including the University of Cambridge, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Royal College of Art among others. Bonsu holds a Masters in History of Art from University College London, and a BA in Curatorial Studies from Central Saint Martins. In 2020, he was named as one of Apollo Magazine’s ‘40 under 40’ leading African voices.

Photo by Nick Hadfield

Renée Mussai is a curator-scholar with a special interest in African and Afro-diasporic lens-based Black feminist and queer visual arts practices. The former Senior Curator and Head of Collection at Autograph, London for more than two decades, she is currently artistic director at The Walther Collection, a New York / Neu-Ulm based arts foundation. Since 2009, Mussai has organised numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, and published widely on photography, visual culture and curatorial activism. She is research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; associate lecturer at University of the Arts London; and former guest curator and non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Mussai recently served as co-curator for R/evolutions, the 14th edition of PhotoIreland 2023. Her past books include the award-winning monograph Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born to Endless Night—Dark Matter (Autograph, 2020), and forthcoming publications are Eyes that Commit (Prestel, 2024), Black Chronicles: Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain (Autograph, 2024) and the second volume of Zanele Muholi’s critically acclaimed monograph Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (Aperture, 2023/24).

Photo by Christa Holka