Marie Helene Pereira

Marie Helene Pereira is a Curator and cultural practitioner from Dakar, Senegal. She is Senior Curator (Performative practices) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany.

Pereira is a member of RAW Material Company since its inception in 2011, its previous Director of Programs (2019-2022) and today’s Artistic Director. She has organized exhibitions and related discursive programs including the participation of RAW to “We face forward: Art from West Africa Today” Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; ICI Curatorial Hub at TEMP, New York; The 9th Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai (2013). She co-curated Scattered Seeds in Cali-Colombia (2015-2017) and curated Battling to normalize freedom at Clarkhouse Initiative in Mumbai, India (2017).

As a member of HKW’s new mission of building a home for the plurality of worlds we live in she co-curates the yearly Bwa Kayiman festival looking at histories of the Haitian revolution and the urgency of reparation, hosts and curates the culinary residence series Tongue and Throat Memories, co-curated the exhibition Echoes of the Brother Countries (2024) among other performative programmes.

Pereira was co-curator of a section of the 13th edition of Dakar Biennale of contemporary African Art (2018), part of the artistic team of Still Present! - the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022), a recipient of the ICI Curatorial Research Fellowship (2021) – a Marian Goodman Gallery initiative conceived by artist Steve McQueen - in honor of the late Okwui Enwezor.

In 2025, she joined Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial team for Venice Biennale Arte 2026 titled In Minor Keys. Pereira is profoundly interested in politics of identity as well as histories of migration. She lives and works between Berlin and Dakar.