Anisa Tavangar is a Ph.D. student studying the enduring legacies of colonial approaches, primitivism, and ethnography. She aims to uncover new strategies for ideological and physical presentation of African art with a priority on object stewardship and institutional adaptability. 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. Tavangar works 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 a co-founder of the Guggenheim Greenhaus, a futurist thinking initiative out of the Guggenheim Museum and has presented on the capacity of beauty as a conduit for justice through the Slow Factory Foundation, Bend Design, and the Association for Baha’i Studies.