Michelle May-Curry, Ph.D., is a curator, scholar, and public humanities practitioner. She serves as Curator for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, where she manages the District’s I (Eye) St. Gallery and oversees multiple grant initiatives supporting metropolitan artists and curators, including The Art Bank Program, the Arts Exhibition Program, and the Juried Exhibition Program. She is also core faculty in Georgetown University’s Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities and a research affiliate at the National Humanities Alliance.

From 2020–2023, Dr. May-Curry directed Humanities For All, a Mellon Foundation–funded initiative of the National Humanities Alliance advancing publicly engaged humanities scholarship nationwide. She is co-editor, with Daniel Fisher-Livne, of The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship, a volume that maps the evolving aims and scope of public humanities scholarship in U.S. higher education through twenty-three case studies.

Dr. May-Curry’s research and curatorial practice center on Black visual and material culture and photography, with particular emphasis on women and gender, interracial kinship, social and political movements, and family history. From 2019–2021, she was a dissertation fellow in the History Department at Harvard University, where she completed her doctoral research, “Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor: Black Womanhood and the Visual Politics of Mixed-Race Family Albums, 1918–2020.” She earned her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and her B.A. from Williams College.

Her writing and curatorial work have appeared in The New York Times, American Quarterly, and in All That She Carried by Tiya Miles. Her curatorial projects and collaborations include exhibitions at the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard Art Museums, The Carr Center Gallery with resident artist Carrie Mae Weems, and the Havana Biennial (2019)

In addition to her scholarly and curatorial work, Dr. May-Curry maintains an active art practice in film photography and photo collage. Her work, which explores family photography and material culture, has been exhibited in Washington, DC–based exhibitions At Home (2024) and Small and Strange (2024).

View her CV here

To book for speaking engagements, interviews or consulting contact her at mm4915@georgetown.edu