Amber Esseiva is a curator and educator specializing in producing contemporary art exhibitions and programs by national and international mid-career and emerging artists. Esseiva is currently Acting Senior Curator at the ICA at VCU, and was formerly the Curator-at-Large for The Studio Museum Harlem. Previously, Esseiva organized Surface has Space at The Judd Foundation and a solo exhibition by artist Alina Tenser at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, and also served as guest curator at the 2016 Glasgow International, a biennial festival of contemporary art, and as Director at Retrospective Gallery and September Gallery in Hudson, NY.
Most recently, Esseiva curated the first contemporary art exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Amaza Lee Meredith titled Dear Mazie (September 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 Toussaint-Baptiste, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Martine Syms, among others. Other group exhibitions include Great Force (October 5, 2019–January 5, 2020) at the ICA at VCU, which featured 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 M.F.A. Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She earned a B.A. in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University.
