Chelsy Monie

Chelsy Monie is pursuing her PhD in art history at Emory University, with a focus on African art history. She employs multidisciplinary approaches to attend to gaps in our knowledge about historical and contemporary African artists and to offer nuanced narratives that take into account the lived experiences of individuals who have made art, the objects themselves, and the specific histories that we can learn through the study of artists and art. In her dissertation project, tentatively titled “Locating Personhood and Power through the Sculptures of Thomas Ona Odulate,” Chelsy employs close-looking, technical art history, and deep archival research to center the life and creativity of the twentieth-century Yorùbá wood-carving artist, Thomas Ona Odulate.

Chelsy holds a BA in communications, with a minor in art history from Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), and an MA from SOAS (London, UK), where she studied museums, heritage, and material culture. Building on her BA, and motivated by her observation that Africa was repeatedly erased and marginalized in her undergraduate curricula, her master’s research prioritized Africans as critical producers and consumers of African art.

As the Crossroads Cohort Fellow at Tulane University, Chelsy will primarily mentor and support the inaugural class of the Crossroads Cohort, a unique and innovative interdisciplinary graduate program offering MA and MFA pathways for artists and art historians whose work engages the intersections of Africana studies, art history, and studio art.

Publications

• “Some Reflections on the 19th Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) Triennial Symposium on African Art”, co-authored by Haley Lynn Jones, IfeOluwa Nihinlola, and Chelsy Monie, African Arts 58, no. 4 (2025).
• “Seeing the Unseen: A Conversation with Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi” , interview by Chelsy Monie, The Africanist, podcast hosted by Bamba Ndiaye, recorded June 29, 2023, released September 16, 2023.
• “Confronting the Discipline’s Past and Imagining Alternate Futures: Realizing Future-Facing Art Histories through a Graduate-Level Methods Seminar” , co-authored by Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Faith Kim, and Chelsy Monie, Art Journal Open, November 3, 2022.
• “The ‘Black Art’ Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents” , book review, African Arts, vol. 55, no. 1, February 2022, pp. 95–96.
• “Art & Africa: Africans as Critical Producers and Consumers of Art” , annotated bibliography, EAHR Research Residency: Diversifying Academia at Concordia, Concordia Library, Fall 2018, pp. 1–33.