Artistic Director, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum – Cultures of the World, Cologne, Germany.
Nanette Snoep is a Dutch cultural anthropologist, curator, and museum director whose work unfolds at the intersection of anthropology, contemporary art, and postcolonial politics. Her practice is grounded in a continuous interrogation of how museums, archives, and images have been complicit in the construction of colonial knowledge — and how they might instead become spaces of repair, resistance, and relationality.
Trained in the 1990s at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris, her early research examined the looting of sacred cultural belongings during the Congo Free State (1885–1908) exposing the entanglements of ethnological museums, missionary networks, and colonial economies in systems of epistemic and material violence.
From 1998 to 2015, Snoep was part of the founding team of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, where she was responsible for the inventorization and digitization of colonial archives and later headed the Global History Collections. Among her major curatorial projects during her time in France are 1931 – Les Étrangers à l’époque coloniale (2008, National Museum of Immigration), Recettes des Dieux (2009), Human Zoos – The Invention of the Savage (2011, Globe de Cristal for Best Exhibition in France), Les Maîtres du Désordre (2012, with venues in Bonn and Madrid) at the Quai Branly Museum, and Vodou – L’art de voir autrement (2014, Musée Vodou Strasbourg). During this period, she also taught African Art History at the École du Louvre and at the University of Paris Nanterre.

Between 2015 and 2019, she served as Director of three ethnographic museums in Saxony, including the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Dresden as well as the Völkerkundemuseum in Hernnhut. There she developed Prolog – Stories of People, Things and Places, an ongoing experimental exhibition that sought to re-narrate museum holdings, and Megalopolis – Voices from Kinshasa (2018), co-created with thinkers and artists from Kinshasa. During this period, she also initiated the first repatriation of human remains from the State of Saxony to Hawaii (2017).
Since 2019, Snoep has been Director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum – Cultures of the World in Cologne, where she has continued to advance decolonial and participatory practices. She curated amongst others The Shadows of Things (2020) and I MISS YOU – On Missing, Giving Back and Remembering (2022), and led, together with Professor Peju Layiwola, the restitution of 92 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in 2022.
Her exhibition RESIST! The Art of Resistance (2021) was conceived as a collective and growing exhibition in dialogue with artists, thinkers, and activists from the Global South and its diasporas. It traced 500 years of anti-colonial resistance — from the Americas and Africa to Oceania and Asia. Her current work unfolds under the evolving program The Future is Indigenous — a counter-narrative that gently “irritates” the museum’s rigid permanent collection. Through the gradual infiltration of new artworks, archives, community spaces, films, and media, it challenges inherited hierarchies and reimagines the museum as a living, shifting ecosystem. Within this framework, she has initiated the Yellow Room (a participatory community and third space for dialogue and co-creation) and Space4Kids (a space for children for collective learning and imagination). Results from the Matrimoine / Rématriation research project will be presented in her new show RETURN (September 17-December 6, 2026).
In 2022, Nanette Snoep received the Kenneth Hudson Award (European Museum of the Year Awards) for professional integrity and courage in advancing decolonial and socially engaged museum practice.

Selected Books
• Snoep, Nanette, Ricardo Márquez García, and Vera Marušić, eds. RESIST! The Art of Resistance. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024.
• Snoep, Nanette, Eddy Ekete, and Freddy Tsimba, eds. Megalopolis: Voices from Kinshasa. Leipzig: Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde, 2019.
• Müller, Bernard, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, eds. Vodou: L’art de voir autrement. Strasbourg: Musée Vodou / Éditions LOCO, 2013.
• Blanchard, Pascal, Gilles Boëtsch, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, eds. Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage. Arles: Actes Sud / Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 2011.
• Snoep, Nanette Jacomijn, ed. Recettes des Dieux: Esthétique du fétiche. Paris: Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac / Actes Sud, 2009.
• Snoep, Nanette, ed. 1931: Les étrangers au temps de l’Exposition coloniale. Paris: Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration / Gallimard, 2008.
Linkedin: Nanette Jacomijn Snoep
Insta: Nanette Snoep