Richard J. Powell is the Distinguished John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University, where he has taught since 1989. After receiving his B.A. at Morehouse College, in 1977 he earned the M.F.A. from Howard University. After a brief teaching stint at Norfolk State University, he entered Yale University, where he received the M.A. in African American Studies and the M.Phil. and Ph.D. in the History of Art. While attending Yale, Powell was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, which enabled him to conduct dissertation research in Copenhagen's National Museum of Denmark and throughout several Scandinavian countries.

As a visual artist, Powell has exhibited his prints and drawings in group and solo exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad and, in the 1980s, worked as a periodical and book illustrator, most notably for The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, Roseann Bell, Bettye Parker and Beverly Guy Sheftall's Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979), and Jessica Hagedorn's Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981). His works are in the permanent collections of the Bradford Art Galleries and Museums (Bradford, UK), the Library of Congress, the Yale University Art Gallery, Duke University, and in many private hands.

Richard J. Powell, a recognized authority on African American art and culture, has organized numerous art exhibitions, most notably The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989), Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997), To Conserve A Legacy: American Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999), Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (2005), and Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (2014). Among the major museums where his exhibitions have been presented are the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002 & 2021), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), and Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020). From 2007 until 2010, Powell was Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, the world’s leading English language journal in art history.

    Among Powell’s numerous awards and fellowships, he received the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in 2013, and in 2016 he was honored at the College Art Association's Annual Conference as the year's most Distinguished Scholar. In 2018 Powell was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2021 he accepted membership in the American Philosophical Society. In the Spring of 2022, Richard J. Powell delivered the 71^st annual Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. The six Mellon lectures, entitled Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect, are currently being revised for a forthcoming book from Princeton University Press.