Meet the Team

Jordan A. Fenton is Associate Professor of Art History at Miami University, Ohio. Earning a Ph.D. from University of Florida, Fenton’s research focuses on the arts of Africa, specifically exploring the topics of masquerade, secret societies, indigenous knowledge systems, herbalism, artists, intersections between art and religion, and ethical fieldwork methods. Fenton has been conducting ongoing fieldwork for sixteen years and counting in southeastern Nigeria. He has worked with Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa since the start of his fieldwork in 2008. Fenton has published his research widely and is author of Masquerade and Money in Urban Nigeria: The Case of Calabar (University of Rochester Press, 2022). Fenton is also an editor for the leading journal in the study of African expressive culture, African Arts.

Lisa Homann is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Specializing in West African masquerade practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, her publications concentrate on performance, creative innovation, patronage, Islam and Muslim identities, and research methodologies. Homann has served on UNC’s editorial board in the publishing consortium for the journal African Arts since 2015. Her chapter “Entanglements of Belonging: Identifying with Place in an Urban Muslim Masquerade” was published by Intellect in the edited volume Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa: New Approaches to Muslim Expressive Cultures in 2024.

Aimé Kantoussan is currently the Director of Research at the Musée des Civilisations Noires in Dakar, Senegal. Archaeologist and historian, he is interested in issues related to the development of infrastructures, particularly roads in West Africa, and the safeguarding and enhancement of heritage in general, in a context of problematic development of African territory. Kantoussan holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

Amanda M. Maples is Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She has taught university courses in African arts and served in curatorial and scholarly capacities at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, the High Desert Museum, and UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Maples has served as the Dialogues editor for the journal African Arts since 2020, and has curated a range of exhibitions on historical and contemporary African arts. Her scholarship explores urban and contemporary masquerade, decoloniality, jewelry and selffashioning, museum policies, collecting practices, and restitutions. Maples holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Of Cameroonian nationality, Hervé Youmbi is engaged in work that questions the functioning of political, economic and cultural forces in relation to Africa. Youmbi often incorporates traditional Cameroonian sculpture techniques in his installations and in performance and video. This allows him to juxtapose classical African artistic traditions with the conventions of global contemporary art, and to destabilize what is considered “traditional” versus what is considered “contemporary.”