Rebecca VanDiver, HAA Class of ’04

Rebecca VanDiver (HAA class of ’04) is Associate Professor of African American Art at Vanderbilt University, where she is also affiliated with the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Program in American Studies. VanDiver received her A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University.  Her research and teaching focus on African American and Black Diasporic art, with an emphasis on 20th-century Black women artists and, more recently, the use of ephemeral print in African American art. She is the author of “Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness” (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). At present, VanDiver is writing a book on African American artistic interventions in moments of racial turbulence titled “States of Emergency: the Politics of Ephemerality in African American Art, 1965-2020."