Elizabeth Harney

Biography

As a scholar, curator and critic of modern and contemporary African art, Elizabeth Harney’s cross-disciplinary scholarship documents, analyses and publicises the work of artists who have been active in Africa and its diaspora since the beginning of the twentieth century. Her art historical writings complicate the interactions between artistic modernism and Africa’s arts and artists.

Harney is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto where she teaches art theory, histories of African modernism, anti-colonialism and postwar visual cultures. She is also the Director of Graduate Studies. A former Commonwealth Scholar, Harney has conducted extensive research in Senegal, South Africa, Britain and France.

She was inaugural curator of modern and contemporary arts at the Smithsonian National Museum for African Art, Washington, DC, where she designed its first collection policy for modern arts and mounted a suite of exhibitions between 1999 and 2004.

Harney has published extensively in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues and journals, including Art Journal, ArtMargins, Third Text, RES, NkA and African Arts. She is author of Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Duke University Press Books, 2018); co-editor of Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Arts (5 Continents Editions Srl, 2007); In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Duke University Press, 2004) and Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003).

She has received numerous research grants, including SSHRC Insight Grant (2021–2025); Jackman Humanities Scholars-In-Residence, Victoria College (2018); Research Grant Enhancement Fund, UTSC (2017); Resident Fellow, Global Arts Institute (2009); and Principal’s Research Award, University of Toronto (2008).

Harney received a BA in Fine Arts from Harvard University (1990), an MA in Art History from the University of Washington (1992) and an MPhil/PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1996).

She was born in Toronto in 1967, where she continues to live and work.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2023