This photo is by Lynsey Addario. One of the two wives of the Imam killed in the mosque at Tama, sits with her granddaughter in her son’s home to where she has fled since the attack in Nyala, South Darfur, November 2005.

Lynsey Addario/ Corbis

In the museum world, planning for a major exhibition can take years. When the exhibition’s focus is something as potentially explosive as genocide, it can take even longer.

Fortunately, Leslie Thomas isn’t a museum curator. A Chicago architect who describes herself as “a 43-year-old mother and concerned citizen,” Thomas is the unlikely force behind “Darfur/Darfur,” a traveling exhibit that explores the savage civil war that has gripped the Darfur region of western Sudan since 2003.

The exhibit, which Thomas conceived and organized over the span of a few weeks, has been shown at venues ranging from the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. This week its 60 digitally projected photographs come to the List Art Center at Brown University.

The two-day visit coincides with a regional meeting of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), a student group that advocates stronger U.S. action to stem the violence.

“It really did come together very quickly,” says Thomas, who began working on the exhibit early last year. “It shows what can happen when people work together to do something positive in the world.”

Thomas says the idea for the show came to her almost by accident.

“I remember the exact moment when it happened,” she says. “It was the middle of the night, and I was reading the newspaper while holding my newborn in my arms. And I started reading this story about how children were being killed in Darfur.

“And it just hit me: Here I was holding my own baby in my arms while reading about these terrible acts of violence directed against children in Africa. At that point, something just clicked.”

Thomas says she spent the next few days learning more about the Darfur conflict, which pits Arab militia groups aligned with the Sudanese government against black farming tribes from southwestern Sudan. According to United Nations estimates, the militias, known as the Janjaweed, have been responsible for as many as 400,000 deaths. Another 2.5 million people have been displaced since fighting began in mid-2003.

Yet it was the photographs of Darfur — the pictures of war-torn villages and camps crammed with refugees — that really made an impression.

“Like a lot of people, I was dimly aware of the problems in the Darfur,” Thomas says. “But nothing that I had read about affected me as much as the photographs.”