Our Team

Dr. Lyneise Williams

Founder, VERA Collaborative

Lyneise Williams is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD Yale 2004). She is the author of Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932, (February 2019, Bloomsbury Academic Publishers), which examines how Parisians’ visual language of Latin Americans in popular imagery inextricably links blackness to Latin American identity beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. In her current book project, Williams explores the intersection of sports, technology, fashion, masculinity, and the black male athletic body in 1920s and 30s Paris. Her third book project examines ideas about trauma, care, community, African American spirituality, and material culture as they converge in two cloth reliquaries made by an African American traditional healer in late 1920s. In Fall 2016, Williams served as a Getty Scholar Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. More recently, Williams was appointed by Chief Justice of the State of North Carolina Supreme Court, Cheri Beasley to serve on the North Carolina Chief Justice Advisory Commission on Portraits and she is a member of the team selected from an international competition to design the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project in Raleigh, North Carolina.