Angela T. Tate is a writer, artist, scholar, and curator. Her work is deeply invested in the politics of care as it relates to art, labor, injustice, community, technology, international affairs, the home, public spaces, and diasporic connections amongst women and femmes.
Between 2021-2024, she served as the inaugural women’s history curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) through the American Women’s History Initiative, where she stewarded material culture, exhibitions, talks, and programs at the museum through the lens of Black women’s history. Her proudest achievements are coordinating the Annie Bell Shepherd internship program, co-curating a permanent exhibition on Black women’s activism, and organizing the African American Quilt Taskforce.
She now serves as the chief curator and director of collections at the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket.
She is also a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, where her dissertation looks at Etta Moten Barnett’s Cold War radio program through the lens of the role of the arts in international affairs, cultural diplomacy, and the African Diaspora.
This research has been supported by the Schlesinger Library, the Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center, and the Social Science Research Council. She has taught classes related to monuments through United States history, African American history, and slavery through cultural studies.
She was born in Sacramento, spent her formative years in rural Kansas and the DMV, and became an adopted Chicagoan–a variety of geographic areas that have shaped her research, political, and curatorial perspectives. She currently splits her time between Washington, D.C. and Boston.
historybawse // I don’t study history, I make it!™