The Institute of Fine Arts Faculty
Emilie Boone
Associate Professor of Art History, The Institute of Fine Arts and College of Arts and Sciences
As an associate professor of African American/African Diaspora Arts in the Department of Art History at New York University, Emilie Boone studies the art and visual culture of the African Diaspora with a focus on vernacular photography and global encounters. She is the author of A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (Duke University Press, 2023) which received a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, in addition to being honored as a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards John Leonard Prize and shortlisted for the MAAH Stone Book Award and the Smithsonian American Art Museum Eldredge Prize. As the first monograph on Van Der Zee in decades, A Nimble Arc reframes the photographer as an artist whose work takes on a new level of significance when its vernacular attributes are considered, thereby transforming the terms of Van Der Zee’s participation in art history.
Her scholarship emphasizes the complex links between the art and visual culture of the United States and global contexts and is featured in periodicals including Getty Research Journal, Art History, Art Journal, American Art, and History of Photography. Additional contributions appear in the first comprehensive publications on the history of Haitian photography and African Canadian art history, as well as in exhibition catalogs for the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and UCLA’s Fowler Museum. Publication topics include Canadian 19th century cartes-de-visite, contemporary artists such as Myrlande Constant and LaToya Ruby Fraizer, a 1948 Black family photo album from Japan, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s 1985 publication of Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers, and the implications of Cecil Beaton and Van Der Zee’s 1938 encounter.
She is currently working on her second manuscript Haiti Chooses You: Notes on a Caribbean History of Photography, a project that examines how the Caribbean can illuminate the nature of photography’s sweeping force on various interlocutors across time. An article relating to this manuscript, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte,” was published in 2022 and received the Art Journal Award. The NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Clark Art Institute, Andy Warhol Foundation, Perez Art Museum Miami Caribbean Cultural Institute, and Brown University’s Howard Foundation are among the most recent supporters of the writing she has done and hopes to do.
The range of Boone’s curatorial projects includes an installation of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the creation of CUNY City Tech’s “Vernacular Photographs of Black Women Archive,” and multiyear contributions to The Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In addition, Boone’s work as the co-organizer of “To Collect and Collate: The Keepers of Black Photography” convening in NYU Accra, March 2026 along with her role as the guest editor of a forthcoming issue on the Caribbean in History of Photograph journal demonstrates her ongoing commitment to advancing the study of photography through community building.
Before joining NYU, Boone proudly served as a faculty member at CUNY New York City College of Technology and as an elected faculty member to the Art History Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Currently, she teaches three undergraduate courses each academic year in the Department of Art History and, through an associate appointment, one graduate course at the Institute of Fine Arts. For summer j-terms 2024 and 2025, she expanded her teaching to NYU Abu Dhabi and facilitated a curatorial student project with vernacular photographs from two major archives. Boone’s pedagogy is influenced by her research; in courses, such as “Shifting Perspectives in African American Art,” “Centering Photography of the African Diaspora,” and “Major Voices in Caribbean Art History” students consider the most pressing questions in art history today.