Essence Harden is Senior Curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Curator of EXPO Chicago’s Profile section. At YBCA, Harden is co-curating Bay Area Now 10 with Leigh Raiford in fall 2028. Recent curatorial projects include Anique Jordan’s I Think This Means I Could Fly at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham, Made in L.A. 2025 at the Hammer Museum, and the Focus section of Frieze Los Angeles (2024–2026).

Harden has organized exhibitions at the California African American Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, Art + Practice, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Museum of the African Diaspora, and Oakland Museum of California, among others. Harden’s writing has appeared in Frieze, Gagosian Quarterly, The Los Angeles Times Magazine: Image, Art21, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Artsy, and Cultured, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs.

Harden received a 2025 Teiger Foundation Research Grant, the 2018 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a 2020 Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellowship.