Cécile Fromont is an art historian specializing in the visual, material, and religious cultures of Africa, Latin America, and Europe in the early modern period (1500-1800). Her scholarship sheds light on the cross-cultural ebbs and flows that unfolded across and around the Atlantic, shaped the early modern world, and still affect us today.

In her current work, Fromont investigates the nature and material manifestations of political and spiritual power in the era of chattel slavery and the aesthetic connections between Europe and Africa created and sustained by the Atlantic slave trade.

She is the author of several award-winning books, including The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022). The latter appeared alongside two digital humanities publications. Co-authorship and editorship are central to her field-building scholarly practice. She has edited, co-edited and co-authored several essays and volumes, including the book Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition and, with Esther Chadwick, a special issue of the journal Art History on the Vast Atlantic.

Much of Fromont’s work lies where art and scholarship intersect. Recent work in this realm includes Debris of History, Matters of Memory a collaboration with Gloria Cabral and Sammy Baloji at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Beyond academia, she collaborates internationally with museums and other public-facing institutions on publications, exhibitions and programming aimed at broad audiences. She lends her expertise to news stories and media productions on such platforms as Netflix, NPR, PBS, Arte, the New York Times, and Le Monde.

Born and raised in Martinique, she graduated from Sciences-Po Paris before receiving her MA and PhD from Harvard.