Michelle May-Curry, Ph.D., is Curator of DC’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities, where she manages the District's I (Eye) St. Gallery and multiple grant lines for metropolitan artists and curators, including The Art Bank Program , the Arts Exhibition Program, and the Juried Exhibition Program. She is also core faculty for Georgetown University’s Masters program in the Engaged and Public Humanities and is a research affiliate at the National Humanities Alliance.
From 2020-2023 May-Curry directed Humanities For All , a Mellon Foundation-Funded project of The National Humanities Alliance. Her most recent publication, The Routledge Companion To Public Humanities Scholarship, is a co-edited volume with Daniel Fisher-Livne that gathers together the current aims and scope of public humanities scholarship in U.S. higher education through 23 case studies.
Her writing and curatorial practice focuses on Black visual and material culture and photography with emphases on women and gender, interracial kinship, social and political movements, and family history. From 2019-2021 she served as a dissertation fellow at Harvard University in the History department where she completed research towards her dissertation entitled "Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor: Black Womanhood and The Visual Politics of Mixed Race Family Albums 1918-2020." She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in American Culture and her B.A. from Williams College.
Her written and curatorial work has appeared twice in The New York Times , American Quarterly , Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack A Black Family Keepsake (2021 winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction), Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors, and exhibitions at The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, The Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard Art Museums, The Carr Center Gallery with resident artist Carrie Mae Weems, and The 2019 Havana Biennial.
May-Curry also maintains an active art practice in film photography and photo collage, and has exhibited her work exploring family photography and material culture in Washington DC-based exhibitions At Home (2024) and Small and Strange (2024).
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Adjunct Professor, Graduate School