Amanda M. Maples is Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She has taught university courses in African arts and served in curatorial and scholarly capacities at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, the High Desert Museum, and UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Maples has served as the Dialogues editor for the journal African Arts since 2020, is the Vice President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), and has curated a range of exhibitions on historical and contemporary African arts. Her scholarship explores urban and contemporary masquerade, decoloniality, jewelry and self-fashioning, museum policies, collecting practices, and restitutions. Maples holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
