Dr. Denise L. Lim is an Assistant Professor of Black Material and Visual Culture in the Art and Design History and Theory program at The New School’s Parsons School of Design in New York City.

She was formerly a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar (2022-24) with the New School’s Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence, the first BIPOC Curatorial Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Archaeology Collections (2021-22), and a Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Alumni Fellow (2020-21). Dr. Lim has a BA in English and Sociology with a minor in Africana Studies from Bryn Mawr College (2008), an M.A. in African Studies (2012), and a Ph.D in Sociology from Yale University (2020).

As a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of art, architectural design, and social scientific inquiry. Dr. Lim has spent 18 years researching diverse South African social and cultural phenomena. She also has worked at university museums such as the Yale University Art Gallery where she co-curated Contemporary Art/South Africa (2014) and at the Stanford Archaeology Center where she co-curated Reimagining African Borders through Cultural Objects, which highlighted objects from Nubian Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and South Sudan. Denise’s work draws from material and visual culture to explore the politics of identity, place, and time throughout diverse African and African diasporic contexts.