Dr. Robert Steele 

Dr. Robert E. Steele was born in Mobile, Alabama, and graduated from Morehouse College. He attended the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked at Harlem and Bellevue Hospitals in New York City on a Robbins Post-Graduate Fellowship. He earned a master’s degree in public health and a Ph.D. in psychology at Yale University. At the University of Maryland, College Park, Bob served as an Associate Professor of Psychology, Associate Dean in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Director of Diversity Affairs for the Graduate School, and for nearly ten years was Executive Director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. Bob and his wife Jean are current residents of Hawai‘i and have been collecting art, primarily prints, by African American artists since 1968. They have loaned works from their collection to many nationally traveling exhibitions and have gifted artwork to institutions such as Morehouse College, Williams College, Yale University Art Gallery, the Mobile Museum of Art, and The David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park.