Shawon Kinew is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and a Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.

Kinew is an art historian of early modern Southern Europe with a specialization in the art and theory of the Italian Renaissance and Roman Baroque. Currently completing a book manuscript on the 17th century sculptor Melchiorre Cafà, Kinew takes great pleasure in teaching subjects as varied as the poetics of painting in the sixteenth-century Italian painting, the global Baroque, and, on occasion, 18th-19th century indigenous North American art. Kinew is a member of the lynx clan (pizhiw doodem) and a member of the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation in the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty No. 3.