Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. Her writings and curatorial projects focus on modern and contemporary art and visual culture of the Africa diaspora and the Caribbean. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics (Duke University Press, 2006), Developing Blackness (The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, 2008), and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015), which received the Charles Rufus Morey Award for a distinguished book in the history of art from the College Art Association (2016). Thompson is currently working on Refracting Light: Tom Lloyd and the Effect of Art Historical Disregard, a manuscript about artist and activist Tom Lloyd, electronic light, and archival recovery in African American art (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press). She has received grants and fellowships from the Dedalus Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Foundation, and was awarded the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in 2009. In 2023, Thompson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.