Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw

Philadelphia, PA

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Stanford University and has served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the senior historian and director of research, publications, and scholarly programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. An expert on African American art, she is the author of First Ladies of the United States (Smithsonian Press, 2020) and numerous other publications on the art and culture of the United States, with an emphasis on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

In addition to being an art historian, Dr. Shaw is also a curator. In the past decade, she has helped mount exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, and Penn’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She has also partnered with numerous institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts and the National Portrait Gallery, to develop and implement numerous exhibitions, public programs, and scholarly events. In 2019, she was an invited speaker at the Arts of Leading Conference at Wake Forest.