She is interested in the art, images and material culture of the Black Atlantic, as well as historiographical issues relating to the notion of African art. She has published on art and knowledge in an imperial context, on gender issues in the discourse on art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and her book L'art et la Race. L'Africain (tout) contre l'oeil des Lumières was awarded the 2019 Fetkann Maryse Condé Literary Prize and the 2020 Vitale and Arnold Blokh Prize. Anne Lafont was a member of the scientific committee for the Musée d'Orsay exhibition Le modèle noir (2019). In 2021, she was awarded a residential grant from the cultural services of the French Embassy in the United States, the Villa Albertine, and an Iris Award from the Bard Graduate Center in New York. She was also Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College (Massachusetts) for the academic year 2021-2022. Her latest book, co-edited with François-Xavier Fauvelle, is L'Afrique et le monde. Histoires renouées de la préhistoire au XXIe siècle, Paris, La découverte, 2022.

A former research fellow at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, she worked until 2023 on the "Sismographie des luttes - Vers une histoire globale des revues critiques et culturelles" programme under the direction of Zahia Rahmani.

Her research interests include cinema, theories of fiction, and representations of gender and race. Her work has been published in Les Cahiers de l'Ecole du Louvre, Figure de l'Art, Perspective...