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Curating Exhibitions
Creating well-researched visual narratives with depth, color and nuance
I am a seasoned public history curator with seven years of experience developing exhibitions and related educational programming in the field of African Diaspora culture and history. I hold a bachelor's degree in African Studies from Columbia University, a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in Sociology from Emory University, where I trained in ethnography and cultural analysis.
In 2015, I was the first postdoctoral curatorial associate of the David J. Sencer Museum of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While at the CDC, I co-curated major exhibitions on refugee resettlement in the United States and the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014. I was awarded a 2018-2019 Beinecke Library postdoctoral research fellowship at Yale University to conduct exhibition research.
Recent and upcoming projects:
Women of Izmir: Portraits of Afro-Turk Lives
Izmir, Turkey (In progress, June 2021)
Trondheim, Norway (Opening TBD)
My current project, “Women of Izmir: Portraits of Afro-Turk Lives,” is a traveling exhibition (currently on hold) of portraiture, family archives, and oral narratives exploring the everyday rituals of Afro-Turk households through the lives and stories of four living matriarchs.
Black Cosmopolitan: James Weldon Johnson in an Age of Empire
Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA (June – December 2019)
As an early 20th-century American public intellectual, James Weldon Johnson’s social and cultural influence spanned the worlds of literature, music, diplomacy, and civil rights advocacy. “Black Cosmopolitan” uses artifacts, archival documents and digital interactives to explore the contemporary resonance of Johnson’s views on citizenship, sovereignty, and U.S. relations with Latin America and Haiti. This project was funded in part by a Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship from Yale University.
Ebola: People + Public Health + Political Will
David J. Sencer CDC Museum, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA (June 2017 – June 2018)
Funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC Foundation, this exhibition examines the social, political and medical imprint of the historic 2014-16 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the U.S., and around the world. I served as field investigator and consulting curator for the exhibition. Field-based activities involved leading multi-country research teams in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea (March - April 2016) with the purpose of establishing the world’s first collection of artifacts relating to the global history of Ebola Virus Disease.
Uprising! Radical Abolitionism in the Mid-Atlantic States, 1850-1859
Horizon Theatre, Atlanta, GA (July 17 - August 23, 2015)
Metro Stage, Alexandria, VA (September 17 - October 25, 2015)
Based on primary archival research at the U.S. Library of Congress, “Uprising!” is a dramaturgical lobby exhibit commissioned for the rolling world premiere of the stage drama, Uprising. The exhibition supports audience interpretation of the historical events, sociological themes, and archetypal figures shaping the characters and complex dilemmas rendered in the historical drama.
Resettling in America: Georgia’s Refugee Communities
David J. Sencer CDC Museum, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA (July 13 – December 30, 2015)
Co-curated with Louise Shaw, “Resettling in America” features documentary photography, personal testimonies and objects, data visualization, and artwork to explore the challenges of resettlement and the resiliency of refugees living in metropolitan Atlanta as they build new lives.
Afro-Panamanian Altars and Shrines
Auburn Avenue Research Library Satellite Gallery at Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta, GA (Oct. 30 – Dec. 30, 2014)
A folklife exhibition presented in collaboration with Africa-Atlanta 2014, “Altars and Shrines” is an exposition of Afro-Panamanian vernacular practices of remembering and community-building through altarmaking. The observation and documentation for this exhibition was carried out from April – May 2014, in the major cities of Colón and Panama, the Atlantic coastal village of Portobelo, and the rural eastern province of Darién. Exploring domestic altarmaking repertoires and their social and aesthetic significance, this project intervenes in a larger conversation about blackness as a set of complex ritual, symbolic, and identity practices on the Central American isthmus. View the virtual exhibition here.
The 1859 Savannah Slave Auction:
A Genealogy of People and Place from the Brink of Civil War to the Present
Telfair Museum, Savannah + other venues in Atlanta (Aug. 28 – Sept. 13, 2014)
This Georgia Humanities Council-sponsored public history project reveals past and present uses of some of coastal Georgia’s most significant ‘hidden landscapes’ of slavery, and the people who inhabited them. As Project Director, I curated a series of public programs, consisting of: radio broadcasts, lectures, walking tours, community dialogues, portable exhibits, and genealogy research workshops.