Shannon Bewley is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University, where she earned her MA in 2021. Her research focuses on twentieth-century sculpture, exhibition histories, and public art. She draws on press clippings, artist interviews, and institution archives to situate artists’ careers within the professionalization of museum practice and public funding for the arts.

Bewley holds several service roles at Boston University. She is a Senior Editor of the scholarly graduate student journal SEQUITUR and was the lead organizer of the Boston University graduate student symposium African American Art History: Present Coordinates (November 11–12, 2022). The symposium featured presentations by five advanced doctoral students with a keynote given by Dr. Melanee Harvey, introduced by Dr. Patricia Hills.

Prior to entering Boston University, Shannon Bewley was the Provenance Research Fellow at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama. She researched the ownership, publication, and exhibition histories of more than eighty painting highlights from the American and European painting collections. Her research, available on the museum’s collection site, better recorded and contextualized the narratives of the Museum’s holdings. While at the BMA, Bewley also co-curated For Freedoms: Civil Rights and Human Rights (2018) and two rotations of twentieth-century modernist paintings and works on paper in the American galleries. Lastly, she managed the digitization of over 1,000 of Museum’s exhibition archives dating from 1951 to 2006.

In 2017, Bewley earned a BA in Art History, a BFA in Studio Art (Sculpture), and a minor in German from Auburn University. Over the four years of her undergraduate education, she was the primary art handler for more thirty-five exhibitions of regionally acclaimed artists at Biggin Gallery. Her award-winning studio art practice engaged woodcarving, welding, and plaster casting.