Zoë Strother

Zoë Strother, Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia, specializes in Central and West African art history with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, publishing on Congolese art, masks and masquerade, photography, and the history of iconoclasm and restitution in Africa. Her work also examines European "primitivism" through figures like Sara Baartman, Carl Einstein, and Leni Riefenstahl, with current research centered on aesthetic emotions in Congolese art history.

In Paris, Strother will complete research on the publishing history of Leni Riefenstahl's photobooks of the Nuba peoples, using archives at the Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine, and continue work on the film Les statues meurent aussi and its outsized role in French debates over cultural heritage restitution. She also plans to examine African art objects from museum reserves with conservator Aurélien Gaborit at the Musée du Quai Branly and the Louvre.