Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Advisor

Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Born in Sri Lanka, she completed undergraduate degrees in New Zealand and Australia, and worked as a Registered Nurse in the UK before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University.Professor Arabindan-Kesson's research and teaching focus on Black Diaspora Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and medicine in the long 19th century. She also has interests in British, South Asian and Australian art. Her award-winning first book Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World  is available from Duke University Press. She is also writing a book, supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship, with Professor Mia Bagneris (Tulane University) on 19th century Black Diaspora art. Her second monograph is called An Empire State of Mind: Plantation Imaginaries, Colonial Medicine and Ways of Seeing. She is the director of Art Hx, a digital humanities project that addresses the intersections of art, race and medicine in the British empire. She was the 2022-2023 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow, is the Senior Research Fellow at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and a member of the American Antiquarian Society. Anna works closely with artists, and frequently contributes to catalogues and exhibition texts, most recently for Shiraz Bayjoo, Monica Di Miranda, John Akomfrah and Salman Toor. She has curated shows at 12 Gates and other institutions, including a co-curated installation of new work by Sonya Clark with Paul Farber and Yolanda Wisher of Monument Lab, called The Descendents of Monticello currently on view at Declaration House in Philadelphia.