Cheryl Finley, Ph.D.
Cheryl Finley is the Walton Endowed Professor and Inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College. Committed to engaging with strategic partners to transform the global arts ecosystem, she leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest historically Black college and university consortium to prepare the next generation of museum and visual arts leaders.
Dr. Finley is a distinguished art historian, curator, and contemporary art critic with an extensive academic background. She began her teaching career at her undergraduate alma mater, Wellesley College, in 2002, where she also served as Adjunct Curator at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center before joining the faculty at Cornell University in 2003—first in Africana Studies and later in Art History—prior to retiring after an illustrious 20 + year career in 2024.
Dr. Finley has been a dedicated educator, imparting knowledge through an interdisciplinary, multimedia, comparative approach to topics such as contemporary African diaspora art, art markets, African American art and film, photography, and museum studies. Devoted to enriching her students’ educational experience, Dr. Finley exposes them to significant archives and cultural centers on campus and globally. She enjoys sharing her extensive expertise in contemporary art and art markets in Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles as well as in London, Lagos, Paris, and Venice, by facilitating immersive, in-situ field study opportunities to galleries, museums, auction houses, artists’ studios, and patron’s collections. At the heart of her work and vision is creating opportunities for collaborative learning and community building among her students, faculty, staff, and peers — relationship building that will sustain future generations of artists, scholars, and curators charged with transforming the global arts ecosystem.
Dr. Finley’s impact also extends beyond the classroom. She is an award-winning author, noted for Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2018), based on her dissertation research at Yale. Additionally, she has contributed thought-provoking articles and reviews to publications such as Art Forum, Aperture, Artnet, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art News, and American Quarterly.
Her collaborative endeavors include co-curating the touring exhibition, ‘Free as they want to be:’ Artists Committed to Memory (2022 – present), co-organizing the global art and culture convening, Black Portraiture[s] (2013 – present), and co-authoring publications such as Nydia Blas: Love, You Came From Greatness (Image Text Ithaca Press, 2025), Whitefield Lovell: Passages (Rizzoli, 2023), My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South (Yale University Press, 2018), and “Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z” (Prestel, 2008). Moreover, Dr. Finley is a frequent essayist, solidifying her standing as a respected scholar and contributor to the field of art history.
Dr. Finley’s scholarly endeavors have been supported generously by the Ford Foundation; the American Council of Learned Societies; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University; the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2025, she was a recipient of the Badass Art Woman award from Project for Empty Space. In 2026, she was named the recipient of the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize, the first national award dedicated to honoring contributions to African American art and art history. Among museums, biennials, and major cultural institutions increasingly foregrounding Black artistic voices and art scholarship, the High’s $50,000 Driskell Prize has become one of the most significant recognitions for artists and scholars shaping the field.
Dr. Finley received her Ph.D. from Yale University in African American Studies and the History of Art and her BA in Spanish with honors from Wellesley College. She serves on the Boards of Creative Capital, the Menil Foundation, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
