Profile

Charmaine Branch is an independent curator and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology pursuing a graduate certificate in African American Studies. She studies modern and contemporary art of the African Diaspora with a focus on Black feminist literature and theory. Her dissertation considers Black women artists’ contributions to Black intellectual histories of collecting and archiving in the United States. She recently served as the Programming Coordinator for Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism and has provided administrative support for Princeton University programs, including the film series Combahee Experimental: Black Women’s Experimental Filmmaking, curated by Tina Campt and Simone Leigh. In 2023, Branch wrote the interpretive texts for the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and Boise Art Museum installations of the traveling exhibition Silver Linings: Celebrating the Spelman Art Collection, organized by the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. Her writing also appears in exhibition catalogs, BOMB Magazine, and Hyperallergic. 

Branch holds an M.A. in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University and a B.A. in Art History from Vassar College. Before joining the department, she worked as a Curatorial Fellow at The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art, where she contributed to several exhibitions and permanent collection projects.