Emilie Villez

Emilie Villez is a curator based in Paris, France. Since 2013 she has been the Director of KADIST in Paris, a non-profit arts organization also based in San Francisco (USA), an institution she started working for in 2008, and a member of the collection’s acquisition committee. 

In the framework of KADIST’s residency program, she has worked with a number of international artists such as Danh Vo, Zhou Tao, Nicolas Paris, Arseniy Zhilyaev, Meiro Koizumi, Shooshie Sulaiman, Haig Aivazian, Taus Makhacheva in producing solo presentations of their work, and has collaborated closely with invited curators from all over the world.

She has contributed to developing KADIST’s international programs offsite, including the exhibitions “And I laid traps for the troubadours who get killed before they reached Bombay” (co-curated with Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma, Clark House Initiative, Bombay, India, 2014), “General Rehearsal” (co-curated with a curatorial team from V-A-C Foundation and MMOMA, Moscow, 2018), and a commissioning project with guest curator Natasa Petresin Bachelez, involving different institutions in Europe over several years (2017-2020). Through these projects, she has addressed the question of contexts within the global art world, a reflection that is also present in the online journal Qalqalah initiated together with Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and research, in 2015.

Emilie Villez has taken part in juries and boards in French and international institutions, and curated exhibitions independently with the collective Le Bureau/ which she co-founded in 2005.