Saisha Grayson

Saisha Grayson is the curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; she joined the museum staff in March 2018. Her responsibilities include research, exhibitions and acquisitions related to the museum’s distinguished collection of time-based media arts. Recent projects include a permanent collection gallery connecting early media and performance art to a new contemporary acquisition, and a pop-up exhibition Pride @ SAAM featuring a participatory performance by Brendan Fernandes. Since 2019, Grayson has organized an annual Women Filmmakers Festival at SAAM, and in 2020, she helped spearhead the 48-hour livestreaming presentation of Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death. Grayson was previously the assistant curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum from 2011 to 2016. There she was organizing curator for Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (2013), lead curator for Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time (2014) and co-curator for the experimental, multi-part exhibition Agitprop! (2015). Her writings on media and performance art, and occasionally medieval art, have appeared in numerous journals and catalogs, and she has taught art history at Queens College, CUNY and Ithaca College, NYC program. Grayson earned a master’s degree from Columbia University (2008) and her doctorate at the Graduate Center, CUNY (2018), with fellowship support from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Luce/ACLS program, and the Graduate Center for her dissertation on avant-garde cellist, catalyst and collaborator Charlotte Moorman.