Lisa Gail Collins, Associate Professor of Art

B.A. Art History, Dartmouth College; Ph.D. American Studies, University of Minnesota

Lisa Gail Collins, who joined the Vassar faculty in 1998, teaches courses on African American visual art and material culture, interdisciplinary African American history, feminist thought, and twentieth-century social and cultural movements in the United States. She received her B.A. in art history from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota. Ms. Collins is author of The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (Rutgers University Press, 2002), Art by African-American Artists: Selections from the 20th Century: A Resource for Educators (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), and Arts, Artifacts, and African Americans: Context and Criticism, a volume in the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience (ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey, in association with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2006). She is coauthor, with Lisa Mintz Messinger, of African-American Artists, 1929-1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003) and coeditor, with Margo Natalie Crawford, of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers University Press, 2006). She also served as associate editor for the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History: The Black Experience in the Americas, 2nd ed. (Macmillan Reference, 2006). Her essays appear in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, International Review of African American Art, Exposure, Chicago Art Journal, and Rutgers Art Review. Ms. Collins has taught at Barnard College and Princeton University, and received research fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation.