She received her PhD from Columbia University in 1995 for a dissertation titled "The Art of the Punu Mukudj Masquerade: Portrait of an Equatorial Society", for which she carried out a year of fieldwork in southern Gabon.
In 2012, she received the Iris Award for Outstanding Scholarship of the Bard Graduate Center in recognition of her contribution to rethinking the history of sub-Saharan African art and culture.
