Bio

Kiara Hill, PhD (she/they) is a researcher, archivist, curator, and artist working in social forms. She is currently the James DePriest Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History in the Schnitzer School of Art + Art + History + Design at Portland State University. She teaches courses on African American art and socially engaged art in the Art + Social Practice MFA Program. 

She earned her B.A. in Mass Communications at Sacramento State University, completed her M.A. in Women’s Studies at the University of Alabama, and received her Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. Through filmmaking, curation, and other collaborative projects, she researches, documents, and preserves the histories, lived experiences, and community-driven art practices of visual artists of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Kiara currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and serves as a primary collaborator on the social practice project, KSMoCA (Dr. MLK Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art in Northeast Portland), where she also serves as the founder/director of the SanKofa x KSMoCA community lecture series. She is also the director of Black Arts PDX, a feature-length documentary film that sheds light on the history of the Black arts community in Portland, OR (release date: summer 2026).