Dalila Scruggs, The Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art 

Dalila Scruggs is the Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art; she joined the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s staff in April 2024. Scruggs is responsible for shaping the museum’s exhibition programming and collecting priorities as they relate broadly to African American art, a longstanding area of strength of the museum’s holdings distinguished by its depth and range. She also will contribute to “American Voices and Visions: Modern and Contemporary Art,” a major, multi-year cross-departmental initiative to comprehensively reinstall the museum’s collection.  

Scruggs is co-curator for the exhibition “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist,” organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  

Previously, Scruggs was a curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture from 2021 to 2024. She has also held positions at the Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art at the University as a consulting curator, at the Brooklyn Museum as an assistant curator of American art and the Williams College Museum of Art as a curatorial fellow.  

Her publications include “Activism in Exile: Elizabeth Catlett’s Mask for Whites” (2018), a contribution to the scholarly journal American Art, published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum with the University of Chicago Press. She has contributed to several exhibition catalogs, including Brooklyn Museum: Highlights collections handbook and an entry for The Awe of the Arctic: A Visual History (2024) for the New York Public Library.  

Scruggs earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Cornell University and a doctorate degree in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University.