Writer and indepen­dent curator, lecturer, art critic and essayist. He has published his first novel “Cercueil et Cie” in 1985, followed by “Les Enfants de la Cité” in 1987, “Les Clandestins” and “African Gigolo” in 1989, notably. Njami is the co-founder of Re­vue Noire, a journal of contempo­rary African and extra-occidental art, and he was Visiting Professor at UCSD (University of San Diego California). After conceiving the Ethnicolor Festival in Paris in 1987, he curated many international exhibitions being among the first ones to think and show African contemporary art­ists work on international stages. He has served as Artistic Director of Bamako Encounters, the African Photography Biennale, from 2001 to 2007. Njami is the curator of “Af­rica Remix”, showed in Düsseldorf (Museum Kunst Palast), London (Hayward Gallery), Paris (Centre Pompidou), Tokyo (Mori Museum), Stockholm (Moderna Museet) and Johannesburg (Johannesburg Art Gallery), from 2004 to 2007. He co-curated the first African Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He cu­rated the first African Art Fair, held in Johannesburg in 2008, and was the Artistic Director of Luanda Triennale (2010), Picha (Lumumbashi Biennale – 2010), SUD (Douala Tri­ennale – 2010), among others exhi­bitions and international art events.
The exhibition "The Divine Com­edy – Heaven, Hell, Purgatory by Contemporary African Artists" was shown at MMK, The SCAD Muse­um of Art and at Smithsonian Insti­tution/ African Art Museum, Wash­ington, from 2014 to 2015. He recently curated the Walther Collection at Maison Rouge (Paris), end of 2015, beginning of 2016 and Monograph of the South African Photographer Santu Mofokeng at Fondazione Fotografia, Modena, Italy. He is the Artistic Director of the 12th Dakar Biennale (May 2016).