James, who is of Jamaican parentage,[1] earned her bachelor's degree at Columbia University in 2009.[2][3] After Columbia, she worked as an intern at the Studio Museum in Harlem.[4][5] James earned her master's degree at Yale University, where she studied English literature and African American studies.[2][6] While at Yale, she was a co-curator in 2014 at the Yale University Art Gallery of the exhibition Odd Volumes: Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection.[5][7] James was a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art.[8]
The Brooklyn Museum hired James as an assistant curator of contemporary art in 2017.[6] While at the Brooklyn Museum, she was a "moving force behind the acclaimed exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.'"[9][10] She was lead curator and it was the largest she had ever worked on before.[5] James was also played a major role in making acquisitions and doing public programming for the museum.[2]
James started as an associate curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim in November 2019.[9] She is the first black curator to work for the museum full-time.[9] Her debut exhibition, Off the Record, in 2021, featured 13 artists with works "that challenge the presumption of objectivity in historical records, journalism and photography."[11][12]