Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, is a scholar of African American art and art of the African Diaspora, ranging from primitivism to postmodernism. His most recent book is Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020), a survey of satire created by Black artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. Powell was editor-in-chief (2007­–2010) of The Art Bulletin. He has organized and cocurated numerous exhibitions, most recently Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, which debuted in 2014 at the Nasher Museum of Art before traveling to other major institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His other books include Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Jacob Lawrence (1992), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002, and 2021), and Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008).

Powell is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History (2013) from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. In 2016, he was named the year’s Distinguished Scholar by the College Art Association. Powell was the James S. Ackerman Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2017, and in 2019 he was the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.