Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator and educator, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since completing her studies in fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA), she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and internationally (P.S.1 MoMA Hotel New York, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Gouda Museum), made numerous public presentations at various conferences and forums and taught at several universities in the Netherlands and abroad. From 2005-6 she served on the board of the former Gate Foundation, whose artists archive and library were given as a gift to the Van Abbemuseum, and where in 2007 she organised a panel as part of the Be(com)ing Dutch caucus, entitled ‘Gate Foundation- Past, Present and Future’. For 2009-2010 Ridgway is organising ‘Negotiating Equity’, a collaborative project at DAI, (Dutch Art Institute) which investigates the position of the artist/curator in contemporary practice and involves the n.e.w.s. platform and her contributors.

As an artist Ridgway is working on ‘Beaver, Wampum, Hoes’ – a series of installations and public interventions at various locations in and around NYC and the Netherlands in 2009-10. This focuses on the value of the contemporary ‘cultural currency’ of Dutchness, in relation to the Dutch colonial past (US, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname, etc.). The most recent installment is ‘Wampum Trail’ at the Conflux festival in NYC. Ridgway has completed residencies at Art3, Valence (1999), Hotel New York, P.S.1. MoMA (2000), European Atelier Programme, Weimar (2000), Künstlerhaus Bethanian, Berlin (2003), Sculpture Space (2005) and Pilotprojekt Gropiusstadt, Berlin (2008) while working in China, France, U.S. and India on site-specific projects.

Ridgway’s curatorial and collaborational practice has investigated alter egos and constructed identities- Migrating Identity-Identifying the Migrant 2001, cat., the unseen other in society- Migrating Identity-Transmission/Reconstruction 2004, cat., sovereignty- (Third Space in the Fourth World 2003, cat.) and the boundaries of otherness- Another Publication 2007, cat. (available at Revolver Books) Ridgway’s writings have been published in MITR, Paraeducation-The Metropolitan Complex, Pages Supplement, Amsterdam Weekly. Ridgway is a co-initiator of n.e.w.s.