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Krista Thompson

Photo courtesy of Mary Hanlon

Office: Crowe 3-103
krista-thompson@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Krista Thompson (Ph.D., 2002, Emory University; Associate Professor) researches and teaches the history of art and visual culture in the Africa diaspora, with an emphasis on photography. She is author of An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Duke University Press, 2006), which was recognized as one of the Caribbean Review of Books' "books of the year" in 2007. She has published in African Arts, The Art Bulletin, American Art, The Drama Review, Representations, and Small Axe (where she serves on the editorial collective), and has contributed to exhibition catalogues, most recently on the contemporary art of Kehinde Wiley and Glenn Ligon.

She has curated and co-organized exhibitions internationally and co-edited special journal issues on "New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual" and "Caribbean Locales/ Global ArtWorlds." Thompson teaches courses on critical race theory, visual cultures of colonialism and postcoloniality, art and commodification, and on contemporary Caribbean and African art. She is currently working on two books, which explore the unique materiality and temporality of photography in the African diaspora. The first, The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice (forthcoming from Duke University Press), investigates intersections between vernacular forms of photography and performance practices among black youth cultures in the Caribbean and United States, and their influence on contemporary art. The second book examines notions of photographic absence and disappearance in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica. An essay from this project, "The Evidence of Things Not Photographed," appeared in Representations in Winter 2011.

A J. Paul Getty Foundation postdoctoral fellowship recipient (2008), Thompson was awarded the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia in 2009, which recognizes "original and important contributions to the field of African-American art or art history."