Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander is Assistant Curator of American Art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. She was first introduced to the work of Thornton Dial and his peers while working on her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She conducted extensive research for her dissertation, Unaccountable Modernisms: The Black Arts of Post-Civil Rights Alabama, traveled throughout the American South, and worked with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, art collector William Arnett and his family, Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter, and the family of Thornton Dial. In 2017–18, she was the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she helped mount the landmark exhibition History Refused to Die, which featured the work of Thornton Dial and his peers. She is currently working on a major exhibition of Thornton Dial’s last paintings, which is scheduled to open at the Cantor Arts Center in fall 2023.Alexander’s curatorial practice is driven by a commitment to social justice, a broad and critical understanding of what constitutes “American art,” and a desire to collaborate with living artists. She is passionate about demystifying museum practice for those interested in the field, and has led workshops on the topic at Stanford University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of San Francisco. Alexander has presented her research and writing at the Harvard Art Museums, Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Folk Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and her writing has been published by Brooklyn Rail and Panorama: the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and she was profiled in an issue of Gentry Magazine featuring extraordinary Bay Area women.