Sylvia Ardyn Boone (1940-1993) was an African-American art historian specializing in African art, particularly focusing on the Mende people of Sierra Leone, female imagery, standards of beauty, and masks.

Sylvia Ardyn Boone was born on September 30, 1940, in New York City to John Russell Boone and Alice Mabel Boone. Her parents were from North Carolina and she had three siblings: John Daniel Boone, J. Herbert Boone, and Edgar Strauss Boone. Sylvia graduated from the A.B. Davis High School. She later studied social science and English at Brooklyn College and received her bachelors in 1960. After graduating from college, she joined the work camp at Operation Crossroads Africa. She later went on to study at the Columbia School of Social Work and received her M.S.W. in 1962. She worked at several social welfare institutions in New York dedicated to social causes, community needs and services. She also studied, worked, and traveled in Europe, Central America, and West Africa.

After her graduation from Columbia, she began working in Conakry, Guinea, at the Ministries of Education and Information, the Office of the President, and Radio Guinea. In 1963, she became the Research fellow at the Ghana Academy of Sciences for the Ford Foundation-sponsored research project "Survey of Contemporary Ghana." She also studied and taught at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana and received a Certificate in African Studies in 1965. It was during this time her interests in anti-imperialism, neocolonialism, African nationalism, and Pan-Africanism grew. She also actively participated in various organizations and conferences in West Africa at the time, such as the Fourth Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Conference, Summit Conference of the Organization of African Unity, Seminar for Youth Leaders of Africa, Council of African Organizations, Ghana Young Pioneers, and the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY).

In 1966, she returned to New York and began working with the Women's Africa Committee at the African-American Institute where she was a lecturer and a consultant with the Community Service Program teaching Congolese women about leadership. At the same time, she was also teaching African American Studies and African literature courses at various colleges such as CUNY Richmond College and Hunter College, Mary Rogers College, NYU, New School for Social Research, University of California Berkeley, Hamilton College, and Timothy Dwight College.

In 1970, she started as a visiting lecturer with the African-American Studies Program at Yale University. She also began studying Art History in 1971 and received her M.A. in 1973, upon the completion of her thesis, The Sande Society Mask "Bundu". She completed her Ph.D. in Art History, and her doctoral dissertation, Sowo Art in Sierra Leone: The Mind and Power of Woman on the Plane of the Aesthetic Disciplines, received the Blanshard Prize in 1979. Subsequently, Boone was appointed to the Department of History of Art and was promoted in 1988, becoming the first African-American woman to receive tenure at Yale.

Boone was also an author and activist. She published West African travels: a guide to people and places (1974), Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (1986), and Images of women in African art in Artist and influence (1988), among other works.

Her other professional activities included participating in the United Nations Institute for Training and Research in 1979 and the corresponding UN Seminar on Creative Women in Changing Societies in Oslo, Norway, 1980. She also contributed to the organization of the 150th commemoration anniversary of the 1839 Amistad Affair, which included a series of celebration and educational events held in Connecticut in 1989.

Boone died in Connecticut at the age of 52, on April 27, 1993.