Andrea Douglas

Dr. Andrea Douglas, is the founding executive director of Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. in arts management and finance from Binghamton University, NY. She has also participated in the prestigious Getty Leadership Institute.  

Douglas was curator of collections and exhibitions and curator of contemporary art at the University of Virginia Art Museum from 2004 -2010. She has taught graduate and under-graduate classes in African American, contemporary and art theory and has published exhibition catalogues and scholarly articles. At the African American Heritage Center, she has curated exhibitions of local and regional African American artists. Douglas’s scholarship considers the cultural and social connections in the biographies of 20th and 21st century artists of the African Diaspora.

Douglas is currently co-chair of the University of Virginia Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation. In 2021 she was appointed to the State of Virginia’s Commission to Study Slavery and Subsequent De Jure and De Facto Racial and Economic Discrimination Against African Americans and sits on the sub-committee of the State’s Commission on Lynching in Virginia. She is a former member of the University of Virginia’s President’s Commission on Slavery at the University where she sat on their monument committee and is an emeritus member of Monticello’s Advisory Committee on African American Affairs. She has served on the boards of the Emily Couric Leadership Forum and the Miller School of Albemarle. She has been a member of the City of Charlottesville’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Race and monuments, the Daily Progress Editorial Advisory Board, and Chair of the City of Charlottesville PLACE Design Task Force.

Her recent publications include After Emancipation: Racism and Resistance at the University of Virginia co-edited with Kirt von Daacke, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press, 2024 and “Public History as Activism” in Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and Its Legacy ed. Gianluca de Fazio, forthcoming from University of Virginia Press, 2024.