Krista Thompson

Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History, and affiliated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary art and visual culture of the Africa diaspora and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on photography and lens-based practices. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics; Developing Blackness; the award-winning Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice; and co-editor of En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean. Thompson has also curated several exhibitions, including Bahamian Visions: Colonial Photographs of the Bahamas; Developing Blackness at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas; and An Account of a Voyage to Jamaica with the Unnatural History of That Place. She earned her Ph.D. at Emory University and previously taught at University of Illinois, Chicago.