James Voorhies is an art historian, curator, and academic administrator whose career spans research universities, art schools, museums, and foundations. He holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the Ohio State University and has served as tenured Full Professor in Contemporary Art at California College of the Arts, where he also held senior administrative appointments as Dean of Fine Arts and Chair of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice.

James's research addresses modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on materiality, spectatorship, and institutional contexts of production and display. He is the author of Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 (The MIT Press, 2017) and Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (The MIT Press, 2023). He recently served as editor of the four-volume catalogue raisonné of Tony Smith, published by The MIT Press, a multi-year scholarly undertaking combining archival documentation with newly commissioned essays. The project was the first catalogue raisonné published by The MIT Press and among the few issued by an academic press to undergo formal peer review.

In parallel with his scholarly work, James has held senior leadership roles involving faculty governance, curriculum development, hiring, assessment, and financial oversight. As Dean of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts, he provided leadership for multiple graduate and undergraduate programs, managed multimillion-dollar operating budgets, and collaborated with university leadership on long-range institutional planning. Earlier, as the inaugural John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, he led an endowed academic program embedded within a research university, aligning exhibitions, publications, and public programs with teaching and research through sustained collaboration with faculty and academic departments.

James Voorhies has taught art history at Harvard University, California College of the Arts, and Bennington College, and has advised graduate research and mentored students across art history, design, and curatorial studies.