Makeda Best

Makeda Best is a historian of photography. She appears in, wrote for and advised the multidisciplinary pedagogical resource for middle school and high school teachers, Essential Lens – Analyzing Photographs Across the Curriculum, produced by Oregon Public Television and Annenberg Learner. Her broader interests include documentary photography, war photography, protest prints and social reportage.

She has worked previously as an Assistant Curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and received fellowships and grants from the Duke University Rubenstein Special Collections Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She received her BA from Barnard College, BFA and MFA in studio photography from the California Institute of the Arts, and MA and PhD from Harvard University in the fields of American Art and the History of Photography. In 2012, she was appointed to serve on the College Art Association’s Museum Committee.

As of July 2016