RHEA COMBS

Dr. Rhea Combs is a curator, writer, and educator. Combs has been the director of curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC since 2021. The first Black woman to permanently hold this leadership role at the museum, Combs heads up the curatorial and conservation departments and works with her teams to create and develop the museum’s permanent and temporary exhibitions.Prior to this current role, Combs was at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture where she served as the founding curator of film and photography and head of the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts (CAAMA) for nearly nine years.

Named by TIME magazine as one of the 12 leaders across the nation shaping the next generation of artists, Combs’s curatorial projects cover a range of topics, including: modern and contemporary art, photography, history, and culture. Her writings have been featured in numerous anthologies, academic journals and exhibition catalogs on a range of topics—African American female filmmakers, black popular culture, visual aesthetics, contemporary art, filmmaking, and photography. She helped create the photography book series for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Double Exposure.

As an educator, she has taught visual culture, film, race, and gender courses at Chicago State University, Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and Emory University. She has held administrative posts at Portland Community College where she was a member of the College’s Cabinet. She was the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Reed College in Portland Oregon. In addition, she has consulted for film productions, given lectures and presentations at museums, colleges, and universities throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, and South America.