Janet Marion Purdy

Janet Marion Purdy is associate curator in textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her multisited global research examines Afro-Arab-Asian visual relationships in textiles, metalwork, and architecture as artistic and cultural exchange across Africa, Southwest and Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. She received her PhD in the historical arts and architecture of Africa from the Pennsylvania State University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Zanzibar, Tanzania, 2018–19. Purdy is visiting lecturer in African art history at the University of Chicago and research-curatorial consultant for Qatar Museums, including the Qatar Pavilion at Venice Biennale Architettura 2025. 

Exhibitions include the upcoming Embroidered Traditions from Morocco to Afghanistan (2026–27) and the special exhibition East African Beadwork (2024–25), both at the Art Institute of Chicago; African Brilliance: A Diplomat’s Sixty Years of Collecting (co-curator), Palmer Museum of Art (2020); and At Home In Africa: Design, Beauty, and Pleasing Irregularity in Domestic Settings (assistant curator), Galleries at Cleveland State University (2014). Select publications include: “The Great Mosque of Kilwa: An Architectural Lodestone,” The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art, 2024; “By Royal Command: Ndop Display Cloths of the Cameroon Grassfields,” Hali Magazine, 2025; and “Carved Doors as Afro-Arab-Asian Congruence,” Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, 2025.