Profile

Anisa Tavangar is a Ph.D. candidate studying the interaction between the rise of colonial industry and ideology with the appearance of African art objects in the West. She recently presented at the Arts Council of the African Studies Association Triennial Conference and was a moderator for "African Re-storations in and Beyond the Museum," a virtual symposium hosted by Arts and (re)Creation: From Africas to the World and the Princeton University Art Museum. She worked as the 2023–24 McCrindle Graduate Intern in African Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, where she aided in research in anticipation of the museum's forthcoming reopening. 

Previously, Tavangar worked as a writer and curator at For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that seeks to bring the voices of artists into public discourse. Through For Freedoms, she has led and curated exhibitions, programs, residencies and initiatives with institutional partners across the country highlighting mass incarceration, the Indigenous Land Back Movement, the values of prison abolition, supporting emerging artists, and more. She is also a co-founder of the Guggenheim Greenhaus, a futurist thinking initiative out of the Guggenheim Museum and has presented at the Slow Factory Foundation, Bend Design, and the Association for Baha’i Studies conferences. 

Tavangar received her B.A. with honors in art history and Africana studies from Barnard College at Columbia University, where her thesis, “Beyond the Primitive Shadow: History and Its Consequence on Contemporary African Art,” was awarded distinction.