Janet Dees

Janet Dees is the assistant director of Arts at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Prior to NMAAHC she was Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, where she was also affiliated faculty in the Department of Art History and an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. From 2008 to 2015, Dees was a curator at SITE Santa Fe. She has curated/co-curated numerous exhibitions and edited, co-edited, and contributed to several publications including Woven Being: Art for Zhegagonyak/Chicagoland (2025); A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence (2022); If You Remember, I’ll Remember (2017/2022); and SITElines: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas: Unsettled Landscapes(2014), among others. She was the recipient of a 2018 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship and was a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership fellow.