Andrea E. Frohne is Associate Professor of African art history with a joint appointment in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and the School of Art + Design at Ohio University. She is an affiliate faculty of African Studies. Her book published in 2015 is The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space (Syracuse University Press). Also, she co-edited At the Crossroads: Readings of the Postcolonial and the Global in African Literature and Visual Art (Africa World Press, 2014).

Dr. Frohne guest curated Behind the Mask at the Kennedy Museum and at the Jules Collins Museum of Art at Auburn University in 2008. More recently, she brought together 9 artists for her exhibition and accompanying symposium Encounters Beyond Borders: Contemporary Artists from the Horn of Africa (2016), which included an interview with the Washington D.C-based Voice of America News-Tigrinya.

Areas of teaching include contemporary visual culture, traditional arts, and cinema, all of the African world, through transnational, global, postcolonial, and indigenous knowledge theories; and studies of space. Dr. Frohne earned her Ph.D from Binghamton University (State University of New York) in the History and Theory of Art and Architecture in 2002; and M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She taught previously at Cornell University, Penn State University, and Dickinson College.

Select Publications

• “Language, Memory, and the Transnational: Art of Wosene Worke Kosrof.” In The New African Diaspora: Assessing the Pains and Gains of Exile, eds. Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
• “Nsibidi Inscribed Geo-Political Mobilities by Victor Ekpuk.” In Ancient Scripts/Contemporary Forms, ed. Toyin Falola. Carolina Academic Press, forthcoming.
• “Politics of Narrative at the African Burial Ground in NYC: The Final Monument.” In African Art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work, eds. Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2013.
• “Reclaiming Space: The African Burial Ground in New York City.” In “We Shall Independent Be” African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States, eds. Leslie Alexander and Angel Nieves. University of Colorado Press, 2008.
• “Representing Jean-Michel Basquiat.” In The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Self-Fashioning, eds., Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
• Review of Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists at the Harn Museum of Art. Nka. Journal of Contemporary African Art 22 (2008): 194-195.
• Review of Yinka Shonibare in New York City. Nka. Journal of Contemporary African Art. 21 (2007): 126-127.
• The Encyclopedia of New York State, 1^st ed., s.v. “African Burial Ground.” Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005.http://encyclopediaNYS.syr.edu
• Co-convener of African Literature Association (ALA) Conference, Ohio University, April 13 – 17, 2011. Theme “Local and Transnational Space in African Literature, Film, and Visual Art.”

Funding

• Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant Program Finalist
• Howard Fellowship Finalist, Brown University
• Gilder Lehrman Institute Fellowship at the New-York Historical Society

Funded to OU

Visiting Scholars:

• Dr. Rowland Abiodun
• Dr. Cynthia Becker
• Dr. Joanna Grabski
• Dr. Salah Hassan
• Dr. Allen Roberts
• Justice Albie Sachs (cancelled)
• Dr. Philip Steinberg
• Dr. Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
• Dr. Monica Visona

Visiting Artists:

• Rashid Ali
• Sokari Douglas Camp
• Andrew Cross
• Elsa Gebreyesus
• Mohamed Hamid
• Tania El Khoury
• Wosene Kosrof
• Salem Mekuria (rescheduled for skype)
• Yegizaw Michael
• Dawit Petros

Educational Background:

Ph.D. History and Theory of Art and Architecture, Binghamton University (State University of New York) M.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison B.A. Western Illinois University