Petra Richterová, Ph.D.
Scholar — Photographer — Filmmaker

Dr. Petra Richterová is a scholar, photographer, and filmmaker who received her doctorate from Yale University specializing in the Arts of the African Diaspora.

She was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1978 and immigrated to Ontario, Canada, with her parents in 1989. In 1996, after graduating from high school, she moved to New York City to study photography with Frank Stewart and attend a liberal arts program at Hunter College, CUNY. While at Hunter, she obtained several grants in support of fieldwork in west Africa, which contributed to her Bachelor of Arts degree (2002). In 2004, Petra was awarded a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at Yale University, where she then received her MA (2005), MPhil (2008), and PhD (2010) degrees specializing in the arts of Africa and its Diaspora under the guidance of the renowned Art Historian, Robert Farris Thompson.

She has worked in Cuba, Jamaica, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mali, Morocco, Spain, and the US with Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center; The Black Rock Coalition; the Cuban rumba ensemble Los Muñequitos de Matanzas; Moroccan Gnawa musician Hassan Hakmoun; the Black Filmmaker Foundation, and New York vernacular dance cultures, among others.

Petra has shown at Columbia University in the exhibit “Making Music With Light: Jazz and the Art of Photography” as well as in Museum of Art and Origins exhibitions titled “Sacred Bond: Mothers, Fathers and Legendary Ancestors” and “Delta to Delta: From the Niger to the Mississippi.” She has contributed photographs to the Studio Museum in Harlem Postcard Series and exhibited her “Sound of Light” music photo series at Havana’s Fábrica de Arte Cubano in a solo show. In 2011, Petra was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in support of her research on gesture in AfroCuban dance. For the 2021-22 academic year, Petra was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NYPL), where she revised her prized doctoral thesis, Rumba: A Philosophy of Motion, into a book manuscript (Duke University Press). Her limited edition photographic monograph, Sound of Light: Music Photography and Conversations with the Artists, was released in 2022, and uncovers 25 years of photography focusing on the griots of African American performance from jazz to hip hop and rock n'roll.

In 2020, she directed, produced, and shot the award-winning Afro-cosmic short film On My Mind (Blue Note Records) featuring composer and saxophonist Marcus Strickland, vocalist Bilal, emcee Pharoahe Monch, poet Greg Tate, and dancer Storyboard P; the film premiered with Afropunk. Are You Hearing Me? (Vibe Music Collective, 2021), her second short film, features Bruk Up dancer Albert “The Ghost” Esquilin with original music and lyrics by producer Iman Omari and emcee Cavalier. In 2023, she released the sonic visual titled Amygdala (Strick Muzik), featuring dancer Madaline Riley scored by Marcus Strickland Twi-Life.

To facilitate the realization of Robert Farris Thompson’s long-awaited monumental scholarly text on mambo (Penguin/Random House), Petra receives support and resources as an Officer of Research at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies. She spends her time between New York City and Savannah where she is a Professor of African and Afro-American Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design.

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