Jordan Mason Mayfield

Jordan entered the department in 2019 and studies contemporary art of the African Diaspora with a concentration on the Americas and the Caribbean. She is currently researching the aesthetic methods of Black women and Black queer artists of marginalized genders whose work considers the intersections of memory, the afterlives of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, ecology, queerness, and blackness. Their undergraduate thesis, “Divine Reflections: Embodying Erzulie, Yemayá, and Black Womanhood,” examined the evocation of Afro-Atlantic female deities from Haitian Vodou and Afro Cuban Yoruba Orisha worship as archetypes of Black female identity in the works of Reneé Stout and María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Jordan is a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Leadership Alliance Research Fellow, and Office of the Provost Diversity Fellow. Prior to coming to Columbia, she worked as the departmental assistant in the Exhibitions department of the Brooklyn Museum and also interned in the curatorial department of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art as an undergraduate. Jordan graduated from Wellesley College in 2018 with a B.A. in Art History with departmental honors and was awarded the 2018 Plogsterth Prize in Art History and the Pamela Daniels ’59 Fellowship.