Petrine Archer-Straw is currently a visiting lecturer and research fellow at Cornell University. Born in Britain to Jamaican parents, she was educated at the University of the West Indies B.A. (Theology History Sociology, 1975-78) and an M.Phil (Cultural History, 1983-87), and also trained as an artist at the Jamaica School of Art (Diploma. Painting,1979-82). She gained her M.A. Art History and Ph.D (Modern) from the Courtauld Institute, University of London, where she subsequently taught (1994-95). Since receiving her doctorate in 1994 she has worked as a consultant for a number of institutions in the Caribbean and Britain including the Royal Academy, London where she worked as coordinating editor for the exhibition and publication Africa the Art of a Continent (1995) the National Gallery of Jamaica where she has been a visiting curator member of the Board of Directors since 2000; The British Council where she worked as a consultant to evaluate and promote the profile of that organisation in the Caribbean (1999-2000), The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas where she spearheaded the development of that institution’s curatorial practices and policies following its establishment (2000-2002), and the School of Visual Arts in Jamaica where she designed that college’s first degree programme in Art History (2002-2004). Throughout her career Archer-Straw has maintained her professional activities as a curator in the main making exhibition’s that expose international audiences to British and Caribbean art. Her Caribbean exhibitions include; One Man’s Vision: The Vincent D’Aguilar Collection (NAGB, 2003) and Past, Present and Personal: The Dawn Davies Collection (NAGB, 2004), Fifty Years Fifty Artists ( EMCVPA, 2003). Her international exhibitions include Home and Away: Seven Jamaican Artists, October Gallery (London 1994): New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art (South Bank Centre - National Touring Exhibitions, 1995), Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s Photographs of the Caribbean (Royal Geographical Society, London and touring, The British Council, 1998) and Back to Black, (Whitechapel Gallery, London 2005). Archer-Straw is the co-author of Jamaican Art (Kingston Publishers, 1990), editor of Fifty Years-Fifty Artists (Ian Randle Publishers, 2000), and the author of Negrophilia: Avant Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (Thames & Hudson, 2000). She has also written numerous articles on a wide range of issues related to research in the field of Negrophilia including; “A Double Edged Infatuation” The Guardian, London, 2000 “Paradise, Primitivism and Parody”, in Okwui Enwezor~Carlos Basualdo~Ute M. Bauer, Creolite and Creolization, Documenta 11- Platform 3, Kassel, 2002; “Why Not Africa, Nancy?”Norman Douglas, (3rd Symposium) Thuringen, Austria, 2003. In addition she the 1980s she worked as a critic, producing radio programmes and writing articles on the Jamaican art scene. Since 2000 she has focused her critical writing around the work of a handful of female artists, these articles have all been published by Caribbean Beat, MEP, Trinidad, 2000-2003. She has also documented her own work as a feminist painter in “Pages from My Diary’ Patricia Mohammed (ed.) Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean feminist Thought, UWI Press, Mona, 2002. Archer-Straw is currently working on a new book entitled Black Magic: Race and Representation from Ra to Rap scheduled for publication in 2008.