About
Grace Aneiza Ali is an award-winning curator, writer, and professor whose work engages global contemporary art and migration. Attentive to migration’s ruptures, what remains in its wake, and its quiet aftermath, her practice reimagines migration not simply as departure and arrival, but as a reciprocal relationship between the ones who leave and the ones who are left.
Her writing has been commissioned by major international exhibition platforms, including La Biennale di Venezia, Sharjah Biennial, and Prospect New Orleans. Ali’s research also focuses on art of the Caribbean Diaspora, with particular attention to her homeland Guyana. Her book, Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora, is the first to examine the artistic and migratory narratives of women of Guyanese heritage, foregrounding a community long absent from dominant art-historical accounts.
Ali is currently Curator for the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice at Vanderbilt University—founded by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. She previously served as Curator-at-Large for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York City.
Ali is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Art and Art History and affiliated faculty in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Center at Florida State University (FSU). Prior to joining FSU, she was Assistant Professor in the M.A. Arts Politics program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Ali serves as Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal Open, the open-access journal of the College Art Association. She is also the founder and former editorial director of OF NOTE Magazine (2009–2019), an award-winning nonprofit arts journalism initiative—now archived—that reported on the intersection of art and activism. She serves on the Editorial Board of Art Journal and on the International Advisory Board for British Art Studies (Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, London).
Her research has received fellowships ranging from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, The Huntington Library (Los Angeles), Stuart A. Rose Library Fellowship, Emory University (Atlanta), New York University Provost Fellowship, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship. A frequent speaker at universities, conferences, museums, and biennales, she has delivered keynotes and talks at The Royal Academy of Art (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Sharjah Art Foundation (Sharjah), Kulturhistorisk Museum (Oslo), World Economic Forum (Davos), Havana Biennial and Bienal de São Paulo. Ali has been recognized by ARTnews as one of The Deciders and by the World Economic Forum as a Global Shaper. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, Burnaway Magazine, Ms. Magazine, GOOD Magazine, and Contemporary &, among others.
She earned a M.A. in Africana Studies from New York University and a B.A. in English Literature with a concentration in African Diaspora Literature and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she graduated magna cum laude.