Sharon F. Patton (born 1944) is an American historian who specializes in African art.

She was born in southern part of Chicago in 1944, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1966 from Roosevelt University.

Patton attended University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana where she got her master's degree three years later.

In 2003, she relocated again, this time to Washington, D.C. where she worked as a director of the National Museum of African Art, a department of Smithsonian Institution until 2008.

She is also an author of 1983 published Traditional Forms and Modern Africa: West African Art at the University of Maryland, a 1987 Witches, Demons and Metamorphoses, and 1990s Vincent C. Smith, Reding on a Blue Note.