Vera Mey

Vera Mey is an art historian and curator. She was born and grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and received her PhD in History of Art & Archaeology from SOAS University of London, awarded in 2024 under the supervision of Ashley Thompson. Her thesis analysed critical regionalism in Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art during and beyond what is known as the Bandung Spirit, the political imagination set loose by the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference. Before doctoral study she was on the founding curatorial team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore under Ute Meta Bauer, running its Residencies Programme, and she has kept an independent curatorial practice alongside her scholarship ever since. She works on both contemporary art and the aesthetics of the mid-twentieth-century liberation movements and their long afterlives, on critical regionalism as a way of reading art across borders, and, most recently, on the relationship between art and anticapitalism, where she is interested in artists seizing means of visibility. She is currently co-editing, with Sarah E. James, “Against Imperialism: On the Threshold of a Post-Capitalist World” (Sternberg/MIT, forthcoming 2027).

Prior to joining Oxford, she was Tutor (Research) in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, a Curatorial Research Fellow at Manchester School of Art (Manchester Metropolitan University), where she worked on the Asia Triennial Manchester 2025, and Lecturer in Art Curating at the University of York. She has taught art history and curatorial studies across the UK, Germany and New Zealand, including at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she devised the class “Images in the Age of the World Target”. She is also a founding co-editor of "Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia "(NUS Press), a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the region's art histories.

Vera maintains an active international curatorial practice. In 2024, she was Co-Artistic Director, with Philippe Pirotte, of the Busan Biennale called “Seeing in the Dark”, and she has curated and co-curated exhibitions across Asia, Europe and Aotearoa New Zealand, including "SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now" (2017) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo, then the largest survey of the field mounted. Current projects include "Spectres of Bandung: A Political Imagination of Asia-Africa", and exhibitions with de Appel and Framer Framed in Amsterdam and Raven Row in London. She also holds an ad hoc curatorial role in Aotearoa New Zealand as International Programme Manager at Te Tuhi.

A profile of her work appears in Artforum's The Checklist