Akili Tommasino

Akili Tommasino joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art as Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2021. At The Met, he organized The Facade Commission: Nairy Baghramian, Scratching the Back (2023) and is planning forthcoming 2024 exhibitions Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt (along with Dr. Andrea Achi) and Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now. He was the 2023 Cynthia Hazen Polsky/ Metropolitan Museum of Art Visiting Curator at the American Academy in Rome. Previously, Tommasino held curatorial positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he organized the inaugural editions of The Banner Project featuring Lauren Halsey (2021) and Robert Pruitt (2019) and co-curated Frank Bowling’s Americas: New York, 1966-75(2022), and at The Museum of Modern Art where he organized Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps (2017). In 2017, he founded the Prep for Prep/ Sotheby’s Summer Art Academy to foster new generations of cultural leaders and in 2020, along with his wife, Dr. Amanda Herrera Tommasino, he launched Pana Projects, an arts and education initiative in the Caribbean. A former Fulbright Fellow at the Centre Pompidou, Tommasino is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, where he earned his MA and BA.