Valerie Cassel Oliver is senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where she has worked since 2000. She has organized numerous exhibitions that have earned national and international acclaim including Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005) with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee; Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image (2007), which was nominated for an AICA Award and presented at the 11th Havana Biennial in 2012; the retrospective Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of Flux/us (2010); and the 2011 survey, Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein (2011). Recently, she organized a posthumous survey of photographs by Alvin Baltrop entitled Dreams Into Glass. Another exhibition, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, open from November 15, 2012 to February 13, 2013, chronicled the history of black performance in the visual arts from the 1960s to the present. She's a contributor to Pigeons on the Grass, Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field, published by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in 2013. She served as a Pew Fellowships panelist in 2014.
