Ryan N. Dennis
Ryan N. Dennis is Co-Director and Chief Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Dennis joined CAMH in 2023 as Senior Curator and Director of Public Initiatives. In this role, she stewarded Rebirth in Action, the Museum’s collaboration with Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy (HFTC), working closely alongside CAMH’s Partnerships team, and co-curated Theaster Gates’s blockbuster solo exhibition The Gift and The Renege (2024). She joined CAMH from the Mississippi Museum of Art where she curated Leonardo Drew’s City in the Garden (2020), Betye Saar: Call & Response (2021), and Dusti Bonge: Piercing the Inner Wall (2021), and organized CAPE Artist-in-Resident Shani Peter’s Collective Care for Black Mothers and Caretakers with the local Jackson community. She is the co-curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration and also the co-curator of the 2021 Texas Biennial A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon (2021).
Previously she served as the Curator and Programs Director at Project Row Houses (PRH) in Houston, where she worked with over 100 BIPOC artists to exhibit their work, led the creation of the 2:2:2 Exchange Residency Program with the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and established Project/Site, a temporary, site-specific, commission-based public art program. In 2017, she launched the PRH Fellowship with the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the University of Houston’s Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts.
Dennis earned her master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute with a focus in Curatorial Practice. Her writings have appeared in online and print catalogs, journals, and publications nationally and internationally and she has served as the guest art editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She has been a visiting lecturer and critic at a number of art schools and institutions and has taught courses on community-based practices and contemporary art at the University of Houston.