Zoë S. Strother is an art historian. She serves as Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia University. Her work focuses on 20th and 21st-century Central and West African art history.
Strother was a 2000 Guggenheim Fellow.[2] Her book Inventing Masks[3][4][5][6] won the 2001 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association.[7] In it she describes masks as part of a larger performance and thus creative process.[5] Against the Franz Boas vein of interpreting African art such as masks as a conservative matter of tradition, Strother’s fieldwork finds they are a site of invention and novelty, demonstrating the agency of the creators and wearers.[5] Critics praised the book, saying the cover blurbs were “not hyperbole”.[5]