Lisa Gail Collins

Lisa Gail Collins is Professor of Art on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair and Director of the American Studies Program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She received her BA in Art History from Dartmouth College and her PhD in American Studies—with graduate minors in Studies in Africa and the African Diaspora and Feminist Studies—from the University of Minnesota. Committed to the interdisciplinary humanities, her research and teaching areas are American art, social, and cultural history with an emphasis on Black lives; art, visual culture, activism, and everyday life; movements for social justice; art and artmaking as social practice and community building; intimacy and quilts; communities of creativity and care; and visual art and storytelling. Her latest book Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt—a meditation on suffering, creativity, resilience, and grace—was recently published (June 2023) by the University of Washington Press. 

Her other books are 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 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), and Arts, Artifacts, and African Americans: Context and Criticism (Michigan State University, 2007). She is also coeditor, with Margo Natalie Crawford, of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and coauthor of African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003). 

Her essays appear in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, African American Review, International Review of African American Art, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Rutgers Art Review, Chicago Art Journal, Exposure, Colors, Journal of Southern History, and Transition: An International Review as well as in numerous edited collections and exhibition catalogues.

She has taught, upon invitation, at Barnard College, Bowdoin College, Princeton University, and St. John’s University as the D’Angelo Endowed Chair in the Humanities. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), College Art Association, The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art.

Lisa Gail Collins is currently Director of the American Studies Program (2022–2025); she recently served a three-year term (2018–2021) as Chair of Vassar’s Art Department.