abreihona (b. 1998) is a Chicago-based arts administrator, art historian, arts educator, and independent curator whose work engages Black ontologies in popular and visual culture. Her research and curatorial practice examine how exhibitions, collections, and cultural institutions shape public understandings of Black art and its histories, with particular attention to how Black artistic production is presented, interpreted, and sustained.
Through curatorial research, writing, interpretation, programming, and institutional strategy, abreihona connects critical scholarship with public experience. Her first independent curatorial project, BLACK IS EVERYWHERE (2026), was a public art exhibition presented with SaveArtSpace in New York City. She previously served on the curatorial team for Self-Made: Narratives of Knowing and Being (2025), presented at EXPO Chicago through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a member of the curatorial team for Undercurrents (2026), developed in collaboration with the Marta Czok Foundation in Venice and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her broader practice includes research, interpretation, public programming, arts administration, and art education with the Millennium Park Foundation, the Burns Halperin Report, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA Chicago), and the Carnegie Museum of Art. In 2026, she was named the inaugural Donna LaPietra Arts Fellow at the Millennium Park Foundation. She previously served as Scholar-in-Residence at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where her research on the life, practice, and pedagogical legacy of Raymond Saunders helped inform interpretive texts developed by the museum’s curatorial team for Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden (2025), the artist’s first retrospective at a major American museum.
abreihona holds dual master's degrees in Arts Administration and Policy & Modern and Contemporary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2026). Her thesis, “The City as Classroom: Raymond Saunders's Pittsburgh Lessons,” was completed under the guidance of Dr. Eddie Chambers, Dr. Romi Crawford, and Dr. James Elkins. Across her practice, she is committed to the visibility, interpretation, and longevity of Black art and to building the critical and practical infrastructures through which it is encountered, understood, and cared for over time.
