COFFEE WITH OCTAVIO ZAYA IN LISBOA

Fernando Pessoa sculpture, Margarida Mendes curator of the Barber Shop, and Octavio Zaya, outside cafe A Brasileira in Lisboa

Octavio Zaya is an art critic and curator, born in Las Palmas (Canary Islands), and living in New York City since 1978. He is Director of Atlántica, a bilingual quarterly magazine published by CAAM (Las Palmas, Spain); he is Curator at Large and Advisor of MUSAC (León, Spain);and a member of the Advisory Board of Performa (New York). He is on the Editorial Board of NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art. He was one of the curators of Documenta 11 (Kassel, 2002) directed by Okwui Enwezor. He was also one of the curators of the first and second Johannesburg Biennials (1995 and 1997). The exhibitions he has curated include In/Sight, African Photographers 1940 to the Present (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1997), and Versiones del Sur, Latinoamerica at Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid, 2000). He was one of the curators of Fresh Cream (Phaidon Press, London, 2000), has authored more than a dozen books on artists, and has contributed to numerous other books and catalogues. He recently curated exhibitions on Cerith Wyn Evans and Paul Pfeiffer for MUSAC.