Aruna D’Souza is a writer and art critic based in western Massachusetts. Her writing often centers the work of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, especially women, and draws inspiration from intersectional feminist thought. She is also interested in the ways that art can teach us to navigate the complexities of the world — to create solidarities, transform institutions, dismantle structural inequities, foster relationships with others — even in its most abstract forms. Her 2018 book, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), addressed the ways in which protests against museums, though often condemned as a suppression of the artistic freedom or censorship of artists and institutions, is on the contrary one of the few ways in which disenfranchised artists — especially Black artists — have been able to assert their place in the art world and claim space. It was named one of the best art books of 2018 by Holland Cotter in The New York Times.

D’Souza’s work appears regularly in 4Columns, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, as well as in The Times. It has also appeared in Art in America, Artnews, The Wall Street Journal, Canadian Art, Bookforum, Frieze, the Paris Review (online), CNN.com, and other publications. D’Souza has written exhibition catalog essays, including those for exhibitions about Ruth Asawa, Candice Breitz, Diana al-Hadid, Indigenous women artists, art and forced migration, and women artists in MoMA’s collection. She is the editor of Lorraine O’Grady’s recent collection of writings, Writing In Space, 1973-2019 (Duke University Press, 2020) and of Linda Nochlin’s posthumous essay collection, Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now (Thames and Hudson, 2022). She co-curated Both/And, a full-career retrospective of O’Grady’s work, at the Brooklyn Museum. D’Souza received her Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 1999.