Professor Lisa E. Farrington is the founding Chair of John Jay’s Art & Music Department, as well as an accomplished curator, author, and art historian. In 2010 she won the coveted Creative Capital Writers Award from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2007-2008 she was awarded the prestigious William and Camille Cosby Endowed Scholars chair at Atlanta University’s historic black women’s college, Spelman. She has earned numerous academic degrees, including PhD and Master of Philosophy degrees from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, an MA in art history from American University, a BFA (magna cum laude) from Howard University, and an Honors Degree in painting and illustration from New York’s School of Art & Design. Dr. Farrington worked for many years at the Museum of Modern Art and, from 1994 to 2007, was senior art historian at Parsons School of Design (the fine arts division of The New School). She specializes in Western and Non-Western Art, Haitian Art and Vodou Culture, African-American Art, Women’s Art, and Race and Gender studies. She has also taught the on-site museum art history course at Parsons Atelier in Paris, France.
Dr. Farrington is a Mellon, Magnet, U.S. State Department, and Ford Foundation Fellow, and was a consultant for The College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) Art History program. She has published ten books and a dozen scholarly essays in the past decade, including two monographs on artist Faith Ringgold, and a 2005 textbook for Oxford University Press entitled <em>Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists</em>, which recently won three major academic literary awards, including the American Library Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing, the American Association of Black Women Historians Annual Book Award, and the Richard Wright/Zora Neale Hurston Foundation nomination for non-fiction. Currently she is writing a history of African American art from the 17th century to the present for Oxford University Press.</p>