MONTREAL.- The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presents the team that will curate the opening exhibition of the new museum, scheduled for 2028. This team will bring together three curators from the MAC along with three guest curators, working under the direction of Audrey Genois, the MAC’s Director of Curatorial Affairs. Katsitsanoron Dumoulin-Bush, Joséphine Denis and Valentine Umansky will join MAC curators Mojeanne Behzadi, Mark Lanctôt and François LeTourneux.

The creation of this curatorial team marks a key milestone for the MAC, as the museum begins to realign its activities in anticipation of return of its teams and collection to the new building, and the preparation of the opening program. Within this context, the inaugural exhibition will offer a perspective on some of the most compelling practices on the current artistic scene in Quebec and the multigenerational exchanges that characterise it, by placing a selection of flagship pieces from the collection in dialogue with the more recent works.

“By creating this team, we affirm our commitment to multiplying our perspectives and offer, from the museum’s opening day and beyond, an open, rich and representative curatorial framework for contemporary creation.” —Audrey Genois, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

MOJEANNE BEHZADI

Mojeanne Behzadi joined the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as curator in 2023. She is responsible for the Museum’s exhibition and event programming.

Recent projects include the 60th anniversary edition of Les Nocturnes du MAC in May 2025, an extensive event of performances, music, DJs and workshops titled A Saturnalia. In 2024 and 2025, she curated mural commissions by Mara Eagle and Caroline Monnet, as well as an outdoor exhibition, Graphic Worlds, highlighting artists working at the intersection of comics, illustrated narratives and contemporary art.

Prior to joining the MAC, Behzadi was assistant curator at the National Gallery of Canada, where she conducted research contributing to Kapwani Kiwanga’s representation of Canada at the 60th Venice Art Biennale. From 2016 to 2023, she was director of Art Speaks, an international speaker series on contemporary art. She managed the Lillian and Billy Mauer art collection from 2015 to 2023 and was curator of research and programming at Artexte from 2020 to 2023. Independently, she worked with numerous institutions including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where she conceived Trajectories, a contemporary art podcast produced in 2022 about notable artists from Montreal. In 2023 she curated Toward Freedom at Projet Casa in Montreal. The exhibition response to the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran.

She sits on the board of MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain.

KATSITSANORON DUMOULIN- BUSH

Katsitsanoron Dumoulin-Bush is Onkwehonwe/French Canadian from Oshahrhè:'on (Chateauguay), Quebec. They received their BA in Linguistics from Concordia University in 2017. Kat has worked as an educator in indigenous communities across Quebec; teaching mathematics, science, music, special education, and kindergarten in Tasiujaq, Eastmain and Kahnawake. They have also worked in radio as a DJ and music journalist. Katsitsanoron considers themselves a “non-disciplinary” artist and curator; using experiential learning as a principal medium to make work and exhibitions that pose and respond to questions about sexual, racial, and interpersonal identity. As an artist, they have completed residencies at Artexte (2023) and The Banff Centre (2024). Kat is currently the Indigenous art and design intern at the MBAM, and a board member of the CACPA (Collectif des arts et des cultures des Peuples autochtones) and MOMENTA biennial

JOSÉPHINE DENIS

Haitian curator and writer based in Tkaronto, Joséphine Denis is Co-Director and Director of Curatorial Initiatives at Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND) Gallery, where she develops programs and exhibitions rooted in experimentation, collective research, and exchange. Her commitment to diasporic practices attends to material culture, ritual practices, and sound, tracing how stories move, are withheld, or are transmuted across geographies and generations. Drawing from methodologies of close reading, improvisation, and wayfinding, her curatorial approach hones in on nuance and specificity. Through long-term conversations with artists and context-driven frameworks, she supports spaces that convene the imaginations of artists and publics to exercise collective modes of sovereign being. A childhood inhabited by theatre and poetry continues to shape her sense of voice, rhythm, mythmaking, and the staging of encounter.

From 2021 to 2023, she contributed to the education and curatorial programs of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Tkaronto), following her work at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal) from 2018 to 2021 as Head of Public Programs and Outreach. Her previous work placements also include Serpentine Galleries (London, UK), Lehmann Maupin (New York, US), and Faurschou Foundation (Beijing, China). She holds a degree in Art History and Communications from McGill University.

Selected exhibitions include Autres Territoires, co-curated at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris (2025), and at The Power Plant, Amartey Golding: In the Comfort of Embers (2023) and Sandra Brewster: By Way of Communion (2022). She has contributed to various contemporary art publications as both a writer and an editor, including projects with The Power Plant, the PHI Foundation, and BAND Gallery. Her poetry was featured in the script for Raoul Peck’s 2014 documentary Fatal Assistance.Raised in Port-au-Prince and later in New York, Joséphine grounds her work in the guidance and generosity of her kin.

MARK LANCTÔT

Before being appointed curator in charge of the collection at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2023, Mark Lanctôt, as curator of exhibitions at the MAC, organized over thirty solo and group exhibitions of Quebec, Canadian, and international artists since 2006 and contributed to the production of more than a dozen exhibition catalogues.

Concurrently, in collaboration with artist and independent curator Jonathan Middleton, he developed a series of exhibitions and events entitled The Troubled Pastoral, presented at the Or Gallery (Vancouver and Berlin). He has served on numerous juries and selection committees for, among others, the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Montreal’s Public Art Bureau, and the Sobey Art Awards.

More recently, in the MAC's temporary location at Place Ville Marie, he curated the exhibitions of Nelson Henricks and Lili Reynaud-Dewar and has just inaugurated an exhibition of recent MAC acquisitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, entitled Comfort and Indifference, which features works by some twenty Quebec artists.

FRANÇOIS LETOURNEUX

François LeTourneux is Curator and Head of Cultural Programming at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. He has curated monographic exhibitions devoted to the artists Etienne Zack (2010), Jon Pylypchuk (2011), Lynne Cohen (2013–2015), and Janet Werner (2019– 2020); and co-curated the exhibitions La Triennale québécoise (2011), Zoo (2012), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable Presence (2018, in collaboration with SFMOMA), and La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux (2021), a survey of recent practices bringing together more than thirty artists and contributors around questions of embodied language. More recently, he presented at Place Ville Marie (Montreal) a group exhibition titled Skyscrapers by the Roots: Perspectives on Late Modernism (2025), which included a major commissioned work by Canadian artist David Hartt.

As Head of cultural programming at the MAC, he oversees the museum’s program of major lectures, conversations, and artist talks, as well as the annual Max and Iris Stern International Symposia. Among the latter, he curated Manufacturing Exhibitions parts 1 and 2 (2011–2012), Abstraction (2013), and (in collaboration) Remontage/Remixing/Sharing: Technologies, Aesthetics, Politics (2014), Topographies of Mass Violence (2017), and Troubling Representation (2023).

François LeTourneux holds a PhD in Art History from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal, where he was a visiting professor from 2014 to 2016.

VALENTINE UMANSKY

As Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, Valentine Umansky oversees the museum’s time- based media programme and co-chairs its photography and European acquisition committees. She held positions at the International Center of Photography and Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, and co-curated the 2025 Gjon Mili biennial in Kosovo, 2025 EMAP x Frieze Film in South Korea, and 2018 LagosPhoto Festival in Nigeria.

At Tate, recent exhibitions and projects include Ana Mendieta’s retrospective (opening July 2026), and displays of works by Belkis Ayón; Dawoud Bey; Roy DeCarava; Nikita Gale; Cinthia Marcelle; Buhlebezwe Siwani; Dineo Seshee Bopape and Rosa Barba. Since 2022, Umansky sits on the selection committee of the Villa Medici Film Festival.

She also translated Roger Caillois’s prose and poems into English (Stones & Other Texts, DittoDitto).