Faculty

Krista A. Thompson (Ph.D., Emory University 2002) is an Associate Professor of Art History and an independent curator.  She teaches courses on arts of the African diaspora, critical race theory, visual cultures of colonialism, postcoloniality and representation, and slavery in the visual imagination, as well as courses on contemporary African art.  She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque  (Duke University Press, 2006), an examination of the colonial imaging of the Anglophone Caribbean in photographs and its effects on landscape, history, race, governmentality, and contemporary art.  Thompson has published in American Art, The Drama Review, and Small Axe (where she serves on the editorial collective) and has an article forthcoming in Art Bulletin (December 2009).  She is currently co-editing a book, Vocabularies of Visual Memory in the Caribbean, and a special journal issue on Slavery and the Visual Imagination.  She is also working on book manuscript titled The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice on visual culture and black urban youth in the northern Caribbean and southern United States, which investigates the intersections between vernacular forms of photography, performance, and contemporary art.  In 2008-2009, she was awarded a J. Paul Getty Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in support of this project.  In 2009, Thompson received the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, which recognizes “original and important contributions to the field of African-American art or art history.”

krista-thompson@northwestern.edu

curriculum vitae

Photo courtesy of Mary Hanlon