Alexandra M. Thomas

Alexandra M. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Fordham University’s Rose Hill Campus, with an affiliated appointment in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She is based in the Department of Art History within the College of Arts and Sciences.

Her educational background includes a PhD in African American Studies/History of Art and a Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University, and a BA in African and African American Studies/Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Brandeis University.

Her research and teaching focus on African and African diasporic art histories, with a strong emphasis on gender, sexuality, migration, Black feminist thought, and queer of color critique. She is particularly interested in global modern and contemporary art and the visual culture of the Black diaspora. Her recent work explores the Black queer feminist errantry of artist Mildred Thompson.

Her recent publications reflect a critical engagement with African and global contemporary art, technological primitivism, and the aesthetics of resistance, particularly through the lens of sousveillance and feminist theory. These writings appear in journals such as Women & Performance, African Arts, and Media-N, as well as in exhibition catalogs and art criticism platforms like Hyperallergic and Frieze.

Alexandra has extensive museum experience, having worked at the Yale Art Gallery, Rose Art Museum, and Hood Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions including “Paul Camacho: El Ritmo y La Unidad” at MoCA Westport and “Homecoming: Domesticity and Kinship in Global African Art” at the Hood Museum. She has also taught at Yale School of Art, UMass Amherst, Brandeis University, and Fairfield University.

Since 2021, she has served as an assistant director for the Schomburg Mellon Summer Humanities Institute in Harlem, where she was a fellow in 2017. She teaches courses such as African and African Diaspora Art History, Visualizing Black Queer Feminisms, and Black and Indigenous Contemporary Art.