Krista Thompson

Biography

Krista Thompson researches and teaches the modern and contemporary art and visual culture of the Africa diaspora, with an emphasis on photography. She is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History (2006–present), and affiliated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.

Thompson has curated several exhibitions at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, including Antonius Roberts: Art, Ecology, and Sacred Space, (2023); Developing Blackness (2008); and Bahamian Visions: Colonial Photographs of the Bahamas (2003).

She also co-curated En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (with Claire Tancons) (2015), which travelled internationally through 2018. Thompson participated in Sharjah Art Foundation’s 5-plus-1:Rethinking Abstraction symposium in 2018.

Her publications include An Eye for the Tropics (Duke University Press, 2006) and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015), which received the Charles Rufus Morey Award for distinguished book in the history of art from the College Art Association (2016); Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award for theoretical and methodological contributions to Caribbean Studies from the Caribbean Studies Association (2016); and James A. Porter Book Award in African American Art History from the James Porter Colloquium (2019).

Thompson graduated from Emory University (2002).
Born in 1972 in The Bahamas, she lives and works between the United States and The Bahamas.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2023
5-plus-1:Rethinking Abstraction symposium (2018)