Tina Campt Named Director of the Princeton Atelier

Reported Monday, September 8, 2025.

Pictured Above: Tina Campt. Photo Credit: Dorothy Hong.

NEWSROOM POST: PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has named award-winning scholar Tina Campt as the new director of the Princeton Atelier.

Princeton, NJ – Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has named award-winning scholar Tina Campt as the new director of the Princeton Atelier. Campt, Princeton’s Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities and a professor in the Program in Visual Arts and Department of Art and Archaeology since 2022, succeeds Paul Muldoon, who has led the program since 2006. Campt began her tenure as director on July 1.

“Tina Campt comes to the directorship of the Atelier with an award-winning record of creating generative, innovative collaborations across multiple media,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center. “Her scholarship and curatorial projects engage creative writers, performers, choreographers, and visual artists: a profile that reflects the breadth of the LCA. In succeeding Paul Muldoon, who diligently and artfully stewarded the program for nearly 20 years, Tina will continue and advance Toni Morrison’s founding vision of this unique program.”

The Atelier was founded in 1994 by Nobel Laureate Morrison, who was then the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities on the Princeton faculty, driven by her own work with musicians and composers. This unique program has a legacy of cultivating exciting artistic projects that allow students to work with world-class creators in an intimate, semester-long seminar. Atelier courses are multi-disciplinary learning opportunities that expose students to the combined creativity of a range of artistic combinations: painters teaching with musicians, writers teaming up with choreographers, theater designers collaborating with poets, or filmmakers creating projects with architects or engineers. The Atelier is designed to be driven by imagination and expertise and as a platform that allows students to work alongside experienced practitioners in their creative process to shape an innovative work of art.

Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She began her career as a historian of modern Germany, earning a Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. She is one of the founding scholars of Black European Studies, and her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in Black communities in Europe and southern Africa, with an emphasis on the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt’s more recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in Black diasporic communities and the interventions of Black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies.

Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers. Campt is the faculty convener for the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics, housed in the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of Art and Archaeology.

Campt has published five books and received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl). In 2024, she received the Photographic Studies Prize from London’s Royal Anthropological Institute.

She has held faculty positions at Brown University, Barnard College-Columbia University, Duke University, University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Technical University of Berlin.

“I’m honored to follow in the footsteps of the Princeton Atelier’s previous directors Toni Morrison and Paul Muldoon and to build on the outstanding foundation they created,” said Campt. “And I’m looking forward to initiating a new chapter of innovative teaching through collaboration at the Atelier in the years to come.”

Among the more than 250 past Atelier faculty are Nobel laureates, Tony, Obie, Drama Desk, and Grammy Award winners, Pulitzer and National Medal of Arts recipients, and Guggenheim and MacArther “Genius” Fellows, such as Yo-Yo Ma, Jacques d’Amboise, A.S. Byatt, Peter Sellars, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Gabriel García Márquez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Everett Glenn, Steve Mackey, Mimi Lien, Laurie Anderson, Jane Golden, John Doyle, Jason Robert Brown, Raja Feather Kelly, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Mario Moore, Stew, and Michael R. Jackson.

Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Princeton Atelier, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.