Alumni News: Daniel Dunson Appointed Curator and Ambassador

The School of Art & Art History is thrilled to announce that 2016 Art History Alumni Daniel Dunson has been appointed as curator and ambassador of the Ancestor Project!

Dunson is the first African American to join the Osramba team; his goal is to link the project to our brothers and sisters of the diaspora. As head curator, Dunson will be curating exhibitions throughout Africa and the Western world, and will serve as the African American representative for the project. His curatorial debut with The Faux-Reedom Exhibition will take place in June (TBA) at Cape Coast Castle in Cape Coast, Ghana.

Dunson recently graduated from The University of Illinois at Chicago, where he studied art history. He is a 2016 Fulbright Grant recipient and Gilman Scholarship fellow. Dunson is forming a lifelong career in the fields of art history and visual culture. His research as an art historian has been primarily focused on figurative representations within Black Atlantic Art. Dunson has spent the last four years studying in West and North Africa analyzing tethers of the African Diaspora, while unifying them with contemporary and traditional African art. Dunson’s art criticisms, and editorials have been recently published in magazines in France and England, and he has presented his art historical research at symposiums and conferences in the United States, Morocco, South Africa, and Ghana. Dunson is currently conducting research that positions portraiture aligned with the art of space, place, and memory, and the Middle Passage as he surveys the visual culture of Ghanaian cemeteries and funerary arts. Dunson’s digital curatorial practice on Instagram (@legacybros) primarily focuses on figurative representations of blackness. Dunson plans to pursue a Ph.D. in art history in 2018.