Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander is an art historian, curator, and writer based in San Francisco, California. Born in Bangkok and raised between Thailand, Canada, and the United States, she brings a transnational perspective to her research and curatorial practice, which explores race and diaspora. Her work focuses particularly on how Asian American, Black American, and folk and “self-taught” art have shaped the histories of modern and contemporary art.

Aleesa is currently the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where she co-founded and co-directs the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI), one of the nation’s leading museum initiatives dedicated to the collection, exhibition, publication, and study of Asian American art. She has curated the nationally touring exhibitions East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art (2022–26) and Spirit House (2024–27), as well as The Faces of Ruth Asawa (2022–), a long-term installation at the Cantor Arts Center. She is the editor and a contributing author of Spirit House, the AAAI’s first major publication, and is currently editing a major survey book on Asian American artists with Phaidon, forthcoming in 2027.

In addition to her work at Stanford, Aleesa undertakes independent and guest-curatorial projects and regularly serves on artist-selection panels, juries, and advisory committees for museums, foundations, and arts organizations. She lectures widely and advises institutions on Asian American art, museum practice, and the development of exhibitions and collections. In 2023, she received the Stanford Asian American Staff Award in recognition of her contributions to the university community.

Her writing has appeared in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and numerous exhibition catalogues. Her scholarship has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, and the American Craft Council. From 2017–2018, she was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she completed her dissertation, Unaccountable Modernisms: The Black Arts of Post-Civil Rights Alabama. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2018.