Saisha Grayson, Curator

Saisha Grayson is the curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; she joined the museum’s staff in March 2018. Her responsibilities include research, exhibitions and acquisitions related to the museum’s collection of time-based media. Her research interests include contemporary American art as well as medieval art, film studies, feminist theory and political science.  

Recent projects include “Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies” (2023) and “Carrie Mae Weems: Looking Forward, Looking Back” (2023). In 2019, she established an annual Women’s Filmmaker Festival at the museum that features screenings and artist talks.    

From 2011 to 2016, Grayson worked as an assistant curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. While there, she served as organizing curator of “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey” (2013), the site-specific exhibition “Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time” (2014) and co-curated the experimental group exhibition “Agitprop!” (2015).   

Grayson earned a master’s degree from Columbia University and a doctorate degree at the Graduate Center, CUNY; her dissertation is titled “Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work of Charlotte Moorman.”   

Her writing on contemporary media and performance art has appeared in numerous journals and catalogs. Grayson taught art history at Queens College, CUNY and Ithaca College, and has guest lectured at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School and the Maryland Institute College of Arts. She was awarded a predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2016 and a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art in 2017.