Mackenzie Moon Ryan

Dr. MacKenzie Moon Ryan is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Art History at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She received her MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Florida. Her research focuses on global networks of trade, African textiles and fashion (especially kanga cloth), and the consumption of commodities. She recently published “Converging Trades and New Technologies: The Emergence of Kanga Textiles on the Swahili Coast in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Textile Traders, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Palgrave, 2018). Ryan teaches African art, global art, the history of fashion, and museum studies.

Ryan’s other publications include “The Art of the Trade: Merchant and Production Networks of Kanga Cloth in the Colonial Era,” in World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean (Krannert Art Museum, 2018), and “A Decade of Design: The Global Invention of the Kanga, 1876-1886,” (Textile History, vol. 48, no. 1, 2017). She curated the exhibition “African Apparel: Threaded Transformations across the 20th Century” for the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, which is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue (2020). She serves as an editor of the scholarly journal, African Arts (distributed by MIT press).