The board of trustees of Spelman College in Atlanta has selected Mary Schmidt Campbell as the institution’s tenth president. She will take office on August 1 when current president Beverly Daniel Tatum steps down. Spelman College enrolls about 2,100 undergraduate students. It is consistently rated among the best historically Black colleges in the nation.
Dr. Campbell is dean emerita of the Tisch School of the Arts and University Professor of art and public policy at New York University. Early in her career she was the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and was cultural affairs commissioner for the City of New York. She joined the faculty at New York University in 1991 and served as dean for two decades.
Dr. Campbell is co-author of Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (Harry N. Abrams, 1994) and Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987 (Oxford University Press, 1991).
Professor Campbell is a graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where she majored in English literature. She holds a master’s degree in art history and a Ph.D. in humanities from Syracuse University.