Jane’a Johnson is Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Art. An historian of visual and material culture and curator, her work examines how Black people across the African Diaspora have used art and craft to claim their place in histories that would otherwise exclude them.

Her research areas include African and African diasporic visual and material culture, histories of photography, Black internationalist movements, modern and contemporary Black art, vernacular culture, and the intersection of history, memory, and archives. Her work also engages ideas of repair and repatriation.

She is the author of, “Past Made Present: Dutch Shadows in the Black Atlantic,” in Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures (Brill, 2024) and “What the Archive Cannot Hold,” an essay on artists Zizipho Poswa and Thato Toeba published in the exhibition catalog What Knots Knot Knots (2026). Currently, she is working on adapting her dissertation Lynching and the Archive: A History, into a book-length manuscript.

A frequent speaker at museums, universities, and conferences internationally, she has delivered invited lectures and talks at The Photographers’ Gallery, New York University (NYU), The Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre, and PhotoVogue, among others. With the aim of increasing patronage and supporting broader visibility of the arts, she has served on juries and nomination committees that include the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the International Center for Photography (ICP), Paris Photo, the Louis Roederer Foundation, Magnum Foundation, and C/O Berlin.

Johnson has held curatorial roles at the Museum of Modern Art and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum and served as artistic director at Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (FOAM). Previously, she was an assistant professor of theory and history of art and design and of history, philosophy, and the social sciences at RISD.

She earned her bachelor’s degree from Spelman College, an M.A. from University of California, Los Angeles, and her Ph.D. from Brown University. She lives in New York City.