Dominic Asmall Willsdon

An internationally renowned curator, educator, and veteran nonprofit executive, Dominic Asmall Willsdon (he/they) founded the film program at Tate Modern in London with the British Film Institute in his first curatorial role. He went on to join the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as the Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs from 2006-18. At SFMOMA, he relaunched the film program beginning with a season of Werner Herzog’s films and Wide Lens, a documentary series co-organized with AMPAS. In partnership with SFFILM, Willsdon created Modern Cinema, a reinvention of SFMOMA’s commitment to film in the context of visual art. From 2018, as Executive Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Willsdon committed the nascent ICA to film programming, notably through a partnership with the annual Afrikana Independent Film Festival. Throughout his career, Willsdon has developed programs that combined screenings with public dialogue and education, featuring documentary filmmakers such as John Akomfrah, Sam Green, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Pratibha Parmar, and Anand Patwardhan.

In addition to these leadership roles, Willsdon has served as a curator for international contemporary art biennials: the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013) and the Liverpool Biennial, UK (2016). He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. Willsdon is originally from London, England, his family having migrated there from South Africa and India in the 1960s. He was raised in the west of England (by parents who met in film school), and educated in art history and philosophy at the Universities of Edinburgh, Essex, and Paris.