I am a museologist, curator and lecturer specialising in photography, based in Switzerland. I served as director and curator at Photoforum Pasquart (Biel, Switzerland) from 2018 to 2021, and have been the director of the Centre de la photographie Genève since 2022. I am the president of the professional association Spectrum – Photography in Switzerland, and I have joined in Spring 2023 the teaching faculty of the CAS in Theory and History of Photography at the University of Zurich.
I studied photography at the Photography School in Vevey before turning to curatorial practices while studying at Geneva University of Art and Design in the CCC programme. I then worked in different capacities for museums and galleries in Switzerland – curating exhibitions and organising events, as well as doing fundraising, PR and communication – in the fields of contemporary art, design, photography and even science for a blissful year, while working as an independent curator.
I teached photography history and theory (as well as exhibition budgeting) at the Photography School in Vevey from 2014 to 2018. In 2016, I moved to London for the museology course at Birkbeck (University of London) and went back to Switzerland after my appointment as director of Photoforum Pasquart, one the leading Swiss institutions dedicated to photography, in 2018. My programme at Photoforum focused on emerging contemporary photography (with some incursions in the social history of photography) as well as the social and vernacular practices of photography.
At the Centre de la photographie Genève, my programme explores issues such as emancipation and the writing of one’s history through photography, or photography as a tool for the construction of knowledge, through contemporary and historical photography.
In addition to being president of Spectrum – Photography in Switzerland, the Swiss association of professionals and organisations working with photography, I am a member of the Academic Council of Geneva University of Art and Design. I am also a founding member of the Association pour la promotion de la photographie dans le canton de Neuchâtel and of the association Documents d’artistes Genève, and have joined the committee of the association Genève.Art, which organises the Geneva Art Week, in Spring 2022.
You can read more on my (relatively up-to-date) full CV, and see what I have been doing lately.
Contact
For freelance commissions: danae.panchaud@gmail.com
If you would like to submit a project for the Centre de la photographie Genève, please email: cpg@centrephotogeneve.ch
For anything else related to the Centre de la photographie Genève:
d.panchaud@centrephotogeneve.ch
Find me on Instagram: @danaepanchaud
And other places on the internet:
https://danaepanchaud.net
https://medium.com/@danaep
https://www.fep-photo.org/about-us/
Portrait by Anne Morgenstern