Claire Tancons

She was born in Guadeloupe and is currently based in Paris, after living for nearly two decades between the Caribbean, primarily in Trinidad & Tobago, and the United States, mostly in New York and New Orleans.

She was a Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellow[clarification needed] at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program in New York City from 2000 to 2001.

[4] Tancons' work of the past decade has focused on histories and contemporary practices of carnival and processional performance – particularly among the African diaspora – as well as public ceremonial culture, civic ritual, and popular protest movements.

[5] Her curatorial work has gained recognition for exploring ways of curating outside traditional exhibitory modes - namely, procession, carnival, the second line, walking, marching, parading, and other forms of public ceremony - and for popularizing the term and practice of processional performance.

[13] SPRING merged the forms of carnival parade, political demonstration, and funeral procession with performances in the streets of Gwangju by Mario Benjamin, Marlon Griffith, Jin Won Lee, Jarbas Lopes, MAP Office, Karyn Olivier, and Caecilia Tripp.

Tancons was also a curator for Printemps de Septembre, working with Mohamed Bourouissa and Christophe Chassol on Etcetera: Un Rituel Civique in 2016 and 2017; a curator (with Johanna Auguiac) of Hétéronomonde, the first edition of Tout-Monde Festival organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Miami, presenting works by artist Julien Creuzet, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Kenny Dunkan, Jean-François Boclé among others and the Artistic Director of Tide by Side, the opening ceremony of the Faena District in Miami Beach working with Arto Lindsay as Musical Director and Gia Wolff as Architectural Director, featuring Marinela Senatore, Miralda, and Los Carpinteros.

In Paris, she has been actively working on Van Lévé: Visions Souveraines des Amériques et de l'Amazonie Créoles et Marronnes, the first collective exhibition on the emerging generation of Caribbean French artists for which she received a Ford Foundation research fellowship.

Carnivalesque as Protest Sensibility," which first appeared in e-flux journal, has been translated and re-published many times, including in the anthology The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), while "Curating Carnival: Performance in Contemporary Caribbean Art," another oft-cited paper, was published in Curating in the Caribbean (Berlin: The Greenbox, 2012).

She has also been featured in interviews and essays in curatorial anthologies such as Truth is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), The New Curator (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2016), Perform, Experience, Re-live: BMW Tate Live Program (London: Tate Publishing, 2016) and, also in 2016, and in the online glossary "In Terms of Performance", from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and University of California, Berkeley.