Before arriving in California, Ciara Ennis was a DAAD scholar at the Kunst Akademie Karslruhe and earned her master’s degree in contemporary curating from the Royal College of Art in London. Arriving at MOCA Los Angeles she was project director for the 2001 exhibition Public Offerings, an international survey of contemporary art that included Matthew Barney, Takashi Murakami, and Rachel Whiteread. She then became associate curator at the Santa Monica Museum of Art where she founded and directed its project room, giving numerous international artists, including Johan Grimonprez and Urs Fischer, their first west coast exposure. At the University of California, Riverside, she was curator of exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography where she revived programming through numerous exhibitions with artists of the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Since 2007, Ennis has taught and been director and curator of Pitzer College Art Galleries. While there she has curated dozens of exhibitions including Racial Imaginary, a visual art corollary to the book of the same name by MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine, as well as exhibitions by Andrea Bowers, Mark Dion, and Charles Gaines. She recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, for her upcoming exhibition Manifesto: A Moderate Proposal, and delivered a paper at the Victoria & Albert Museum on the wunderkammer and contemporary exhibition models.