Biography
Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian of the African Diaspora and an exhibition curator. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice Brown University and at Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina Greensboro. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience Maison des Esclaves project on Goree Island, Senegal, and is on the Board of Trustees of the African Diaspora International Film Festival.
Diouf is the author of Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, which received the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association, the 2009 Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association and was a finalist for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
She is the editor of Black Power 50 , Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, and In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. She wrote the historical note for the updated edition of the acclaimed book of both children's literature and art history The Middle Passage by Tom Feelings. She has written several books for children on African history and American slavery. Kings and Queens of West Africa won the African Studies Association 2001 Africana Book Award for Older Readers. Her illustrated book Bintou's Braids has been translated into French, Japanese and Portuguese.
Diouf has curated several exhibitions, including Black Power!, Ready for the Revolution, In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, The Abolition of the Slave Trade, The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World, Africana Age, Black Power! (on site), Africans in India (on site), Power In Print (on site), Black New Yorkers.
In 2015 , she was the keynote speaker addressing the United Nations General Assembly on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, on the topic Women and Slavery. A recipient of the Rosa Parks Award, the Dr. Betty Shabazz Achievement Award, and the Pen and Brush Achievement Award, She was the founding director of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of The New York Public Library.