Alisa Swindell's primary areas of scholarship are the history of photography and other modes of contemporary art with a focus on race and sexuality. She has taught original courses on the history of photography and African American and feminist art at several schools in the Midwest. In the museum field, she has been a curator, co-curator, or curatorial researcher for the exhibitions Inhabiting Historical Time: Slavery and its Afterlives, Visual Kinship, And I'm Feeling Good: Relaxation and Resistance, Femme is Fierce: Femme Queer Performance in Photography, A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence, Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem, Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer, and many others. She has worked at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, the Art Institute of Chicago, Gallery 400, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Swindell has been published in Re-Envisioning Histories of American Art, Gastronomica, and the catalogues for Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts, Let Me Be an Object that Screams, and Queer Constellations. She was a frequent art reviewer for Newcity newspaper. In a previous life, she was an arts administrator working in film, performance, and dance. She is ABD in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago with a concentration in gender and women's studies, and holds MAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of New Orleans and an AB from Bryn Mawr College.