Co-curator of Paradise/Mash-up: Andrae Green, a Mills Gallery Exhibition

Tiarra Inez Brown is an independent curator and art historian whose work centers Black visual culture, diasporic identity, and the transnational histories of modern and contemporary art. Guided by a research-driven and community-informed approach, she is committed to amplifying narratives historically marginalized with encyclopedic art institutions and reimagining the possibilities of cultural memory, heritage, and historical interpretation. 

Brown most recently served on the curatorial team for Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a landmark exhibition that reexamines the Harlem Renaissance within a global modernist context. Her curatorial experience also includes Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter at The Met and At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century Modernism at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Across these projects, she has contributed to critical reinterpretations of art history through the lens of race, identity, and global exchange.

Spending several years on the archival team at the Rutgers Oral History Archives, Brown developed a deep appreciation for the power of individual narratives and personal memory—an ethos that continues to guide her curatorial work. Her projects are grounded in rigorous historical research and driven by a desire to surface overlooked voices and build more expansive understandings of the past.

She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and dual Bachelor’s degrees in History and Art History from Rutgers University