The Stamps School of Art & Design has invited a select group of internationally renowned curators, writers, artists, and arts professionals to lend their critical insights as they view and jury the program’s MFA Thesis Exhibition and First-Year Exhibition. This year, we are honored to welcome internationally acclaimed cultural producers Alisha Wormsley, Aruna D’Souza, and Robin K. Williams as this year’s Visiting Critics for a three-day campus visit. On Saturday, April 11, they will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Srimoyee Mitra, Director of Stamps Gallery. Joined by faculty, graduate students, and the broader Ann Arbor community, our Visiting Critics will reflect on the MFA candidates’ work and its dialogue with the contemporary moment.

Free and open to the public. Registration is requested. Light refreshments will be provided.

Learn More About the Visiting Critics:

Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art, intersectional feminisms, and diasporic aesthetics. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and in numerous artist’s monographs and exhibition catalogues. Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Recent editorial projects include Linda Nochlin’s Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now and Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2018; she co-curated the retrospective Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. She was appointed the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art in 2022, and the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Social Engagement at the Corcoran School of Art, George Washington University, in 2022-2023. Her most recent book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published in 2024.







Alisha Wormsley (Pittsburgh, PA) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer whose work exists at the intersections of public art, film, craft and social practice. Her work transforms public space and collective imagination through projects rooted in liberated futures, ritual, and community care. She is the founder of Sibyls Shrine, a residency for Black artists who M/other; creator of There Are Black People in the Future; and co-creator, with artist Kite, of Cosmologyscape, exploring the power of collective dreaming. Her newest film-in-process, Children of NAN: A Survival Guide—which presents tutorials and survival strategies for future Black femmes while exploring their relationship to ritual, craft, and the natural world—has been awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman/NYFA Award, a Pittsburgh Foundation grant, and the Sundance Interdisciplinary Grant. Wormsley is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and is an Assistant Professor of Art in Social Practice at Carnegie Mellon University.

Robin K. Williams is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), with curatorial and scholarly interests in visual, performance, sound, and socially engaged artistic practices. At UMMA, she leads initiatives such as the UMMA-Labadie artist research residency program, supporting projects grounded in activism and archival inquiry. Previously, as Curator at The Contemporary Austin, she curated exhibitions including This Land (2023), Tarek Atoui: The Whisperers (2022), and Daniel Johnston: I Live My Broken Dreams (2021), and commissions with artists including Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, Vivian Caccuri, Celeste, Raven Chacon, Jenny Holzer, Katarina Janečková Walshe, and Clare Rojas. She was Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, curating Danielle Dean: True Red Ruin (2018) and co-curating Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance (2017), and Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art. Her scholarship on Joan Jonas appears in the international journals Stedelijk Studies and Sin Objeto. Williams holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Texas, has taught at UT-Austin and Texas State University, and has served on public art committees at both institutions.