CURATOR TALKS: Amber Esseiva

Since its founding in 2013, Locust Talks has become one of Miami's premier platforms for engagement with contemporary curatorial thinking. Now returning home to Locust Projects, CURATOR TALKS presents four curators per season — a mix of emerging and established voices — who share their curatorial vision and practice, the artists and ideas that fuel their work, and how they support artists across institutional and non-traditional contexts.

A defining feature of the CURATOR TALKS series is its commitment to meaningful local exchange: each visiting curator participates in studio visits with Miami-based artists, offering vital critical feedback and professional visibility to the city's creative community. This direct artist engagement remains central to the series' mission of broadening access to contemporary curatorial practice beyond major art centers.

Amber Esseiva is a Swiss-Senegalese-American curator and educator specialized in producing contemporary art exhibitions and programs by national and international mid-career and emerging artists. Esseiva is currently the Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA VCU). A VCUarts alumna, Esseiva has been essential to the ICA’s programming since joining the institution in 2016. Esseiva is also the Curator-at-Large for The Studio Museum Harlem.

Most recently, Esseiva curated the first contemporary art exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Amaza Lee Meredith titled Dear Mazie, (Sept 2024-March 2025). The exhibition includes commissions by AD-WO (Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood), The Black School (Shani Peters and Joseph Cuillier), Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Kapwani Kiwanga, Abigail Lucien, Practise (James Goggin and Shan James), Tschabalala Self, and Cauleen Smith. Esseiva has also curated solo exhibitions by Kandis Williams, Naima Green, Jeremy Touissaint-Baptise, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Martine Syms, among others. Other group exhibitions include Great Force (October 5, 2019 – January 5, 2020), the ICA’s exhibition featuring new commissions and recent work by an intergenerational group of 24 artists, exploring how art can be used to envision new forms of race and representation freed from the bounds of historic racial constructs. Esseiva received her M.A. in 2015 from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). She also co-founded the interdisciplinary curatorial journal aCCeSsions and was appointed the curator of the 2014 M.F.A. graduate thesis exhibition at Bard MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She earned a B.A. in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University.

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