Julie Crooks is Associate Curator, Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). She received a PhD in the Department of History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK, based on her dissertation Alphonso Lisk-Carew and Early Photography in Sierra Leone. Julie’s research focuses on the history of photography in West Africa and the African diaspora. In 2017, she was the curator of Free Black North at the AGO, and in 2018, Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires. She is also co-curator of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) exhibition, Here We are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art (2018), which has travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal and opened at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in May 2019.