Maya Harakawa
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History
Maya Harakawa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History. She is an art historian of the African diaspora in the United States. Her research focuses on the 1960s and the relationship between race, artistic practice and social movements of that decade. She’s currently working on a book project, which is the first art historical study of Harlem in the 1960s.
She received her PhD from the Graduate Center at City University of New York in 2022, where she received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Getty Research Institute. She was also a curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art and maintains a broad interest in the field of American art, particularly as it relates to histories of racism, colonialism and imperialism.
Harakawa’s field is growing very rapidly. While scholars have been undertaking important work on the relationship between art, race and anti-Blackness for some time, this renewed interest is pushing the field in exciting new directions that she hopes will lead to broader change in the discipline of art history, which still focuses predominantly on white artists and does not always engage in histories of slavery, colonialism or other forms of oppression.
Harakawa loves teaching and meeting U of T students.