Amy L. Powell is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on contemporary art from Africa, Europe, and the United States. She is particularly interested in postcolonial theory, contemporary theories of representation, transnational feminism, and African cinema. Her dissertation examines transnational contemporary art that uses temporality as a set of critical strategies for interrogating issues of subjectivity, representation, and spectatorship. Her essay "Phantom Projections, Creolized Cinema: Time-Images in Isaac Julien's Fantôme Afrique" will appear in the 2009 issue of the Chicago Art Journal.

Curatorial work plays a significant role in Amy's research. Her exhibitions include Impermanent Archive: Photography and the Technologies of Empire and Race (with Marcela Guerrero, Nov. 3, 2008 - Jan. 2, 2009, Steenbock Gallery), Sighting Knowledge: Photography in the Lab, the Museum and the Archive (with Beth Zinsli, Spring 2008, Chazen Museum of Art), The Scientist's Eye: Dialogues between Art & Science (with Beth Zinsli, Spring 2008, Kohler Art Library) and the co-curated exhibition Visualizing TRANS (October 2006, Kupfer Center), about which she published her essay "Seeing Trans for the Trees: Rhizomatic Curatorial Frameworks and the Visualizing TRANS Exhibition" in the Fall 2007 issue of Invisible Culture.

Amy earned her M.A. from UW-Madison in 2007. Her MA paper, titled "Translating Consciousness: Towards a Transnational Feminism in Ousmane Sembene's Moolaadé," explored how Sembene's final film brought an image of one Burkinabe locality to an international viewing audience, and the implications of Sembene's filmmaking practice for transnational feminist organizing around Moolaadé's central issue of female circumcision.

Amy hails from central Kentucky, where she earned a B.A. in Art History and Arts Administration, with a minor in French Language and Literature from the University of Kentucky.