Edith Doove is a curator, researcher, and estate agent, with a particular interest in notions of emergence and contingency and in transdisciplinary collaborations. Central to her practice are the interconnections between art and care, property and heritage.
Background
She started curating in 1987 in Antwerp while studying art history at Leiden University in the Netherlands, her birth country. Working as a freelance curator and art critic in Belgium until 2010, she was director-curator of MDD-Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (1999-2004) and curator of such large-scale projects as A Riddle for Zoersel (2000), Super! Triennial for Visual Art, Fashion and Design – Hasselt (2005) and Parallellepipeda – between art & science – Museum M, Leuven (2010).
In 2010, she moved to Plymouth, UK, to join Transtechnology Research at Plymouth University, where she completed her PhD on Laughter, inframince and cybernetics – Exploring the Curatorial as Creative Act – in November 2017. Following Brexit, she moved to France in 2018, where she currently lives and works in Rouen.
In 2023, she was the curator of visual arts for the Arts Festival Watou, and in 2024, she curated The Research Group – an artists’ collective 1967-1972, with accompanying publication at De Stadsmus, Hasselt on the basis of her MA thesis, completed in 1986.
Current
Curating a project for an NGO based in Moshi, Tanzania, inspired her to rethink her practice. She therefore transformed her creative consultancy, Bureau Doove, which she started in 2015, into *hadithi – stories with care. In spring 2026, she also joined the young French estate agency NEXUS IMMOBILIER in Rouen.
Edith Doove is a principal investigator at Vagab(o/u)nds Research, a senior critic at Leonardo Reviews and a member of AICA, C-E-A and RN13BIS.
Call for Curators recently published this Members Spotlight on her.
In addition to her experience as a curator, she also has a long career as a lecturer in art history at higher education institutions in Belgium, England and France. She is also active as a freelance translator in the language pairs English-Dutch, French-Dutch and German-Dutch.
everything else …
… initially started as an ongoing project of drawings, photos and writing. While the title initially indicated an indefinable role alongside her main activity as a curator and researcher, it has gained greater importance over time and now encompasses all of her activities.
Whereas her photos can be called accidental snapshots, in which she explores the tension between reality and fiction, her drawing practice is more research-related and re-initiated through her activities within the research group The Faculty of Minor Disturbances (UK/F/P).
Carrousel, 2022
Portrait photo by Jean-Louis Vincendeau, 2022
edith doove 