CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

Ellen is a PhD candidate specializing in Ancient Mediterranean art and archaeology at Emory University. Her dissertation focuses on 4th–2nd century BCE decorative arts in northern Greece with imagery of abundance and the ways in which it encourages shared experiences and relationships between people. Ellen holds a B.A. in Art History and Classics from Washington and Lee University, and an M.A. in Art History and Archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She has worked on excavations in Italy and Greece, where she served as registrar and glass expert at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace. This past year she has held the Doreen Canaday Spitzer Advanced Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece. She has also held the Mellon Fellowship in Object-Center Curatorial Research at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta where she contextualized two mule’s head fulcrum attachments from ancient couches with a modern selenium coating.

María Carrillo Marquina is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Art History and Latin American Studies program at Tulane University. Her dissertation focuses on the art and material culture of the African diaspora in the Spanish Americas with a particular interest in Afro- Latino artistic and religious expressions in colonial Mexico and Cuba. Her work contends with the absence of Afro-diasporic cofrades in art historical narratives using extensive archival evidence to purposefully center subaltern epistemologies by considering their sculptures and manuscripts’ modalities, movement, and mutability. She centers on Mexico City and Havana, two Black urban centers in the Atlantic, to contribute nuanced understandings of global devotional patterns and their effects on early modern societies. She has worked at various museums including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Gibbes Museum of Art. María earned her Master of Arts in Art History at the University of Delaware and her Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Arts Management at the College of Charleston Honors College.

Letícia Cobra Lima is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies (2020). Specializing in contemporary women and queer artists from Latin America, her dissertation, “Assembling the Body: Sculpture in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, 1960- 1996,” thematizes the sculpture of Farnese de Andrade (1926-1996), Feliza Bursztyn (1933- 1982), and Liliana Maresca (1951-1994), as they explored the dissimulative potential of assemblage art to articulate new possibilities for the body, raising issues of citizenship, the status of the artwork, traditional gender roles, and the ever-present aftereffects of colonization. Letícia received the 2019- 20, 2020-21, and 2022-23 Murray Roman Curatorial Fellowship from the Art, Design & Architecture Museum (UCSB), where she currently serves as Graduate Curator of Education. She has a master’s degree in Visual Arts (Santa Catarina State University/ Brazil, 2014) and bachelor’s degrees in Graphic Design (Federal University of Santa Catarina/Brazil, 2011) and Visual Arts (Santa Catarina State University/Brazil, 2015).

Amy Crum is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles where she specializes in contemporary art of the Americas. Her dissertation examines several experimental mural projects in Los Angeles and Mexico by Chicanx artists beginning in the 1970s in dialogue with the emergence of practices like installation art, institutional critique, and social practice art. Her research has recently been supported by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Archives of American Art, the Fowler Museum, and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. In addition to her academic pursuits, Crum is an alumna of the Independent Curators International Curatorial Intensive and she has been involved in numerous exhibitions at institutions like the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Claire studies the intersections of visual cultures, identities, and faiths in the medieval Mediterranean. Her dissertation examines silk production in Sicily, studying hundreds of textile fragments attributed—or misattributed—to the island, and evaluating their place in historiographies of the global Middle Ages. Her other projects investigate the afterlives of medieval Mediterraneanisms as manifest in modern extremisms, histories of fashion, and neomedieval monuments such as the Cathedral of Mogadishu.

She received the 2024-2025 Paul Mellon Rome Prize in Medieval Studies and is the inaugural fellow of the International Interfaith Research Lab at Teachers College. Her dissertation has also been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and SSRC-Mellon Mays, while her work on extremist appropriations of the Middle Ages has received grants and fellowships from the Medieval Academy of America and RaceB4Race, among others.

She earned an M.Phil. from Trinity College Dublin as a Mitchell Scholar and a B.A. in art history and Italian from Northwestern University, where she studied contemporary art as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She was also Director of Education and Outreach of the nonprofit ART WORKS Projects, where she developed exhibitions and programming to amplify diverse social justice causes across three continents.

Dantaé Garee Elliott is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She is particularly interested in contemporary Caribbean Art and its relation to migration within the Caribbean diaspora and region through examining the barrel children phenomenon. To highlight mobile remittance and the relationship between a material object (barrel poetics) and what she terms barrel poetics, granting agency to a material object that affects subjectivity. She holds a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature with a concentration in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) from Roanoke College and an M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature focusing on Colonial Literature from the University of Delaware. She was the program assistant for the Caribbean Initiative workshop series at the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies at NYU. In the summer of 2022, she served as Co-Director for the CCCADI (Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute) Summer Seminar for their Curatorial Fellowship class 2022. She works as an Editorial Assistant for Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism . She is a featured artist in Volume 04 of Forgotten Lands, titled Currents of Africa, released in June 2022, and copy editor for Volume 05, titled The Haunted Tropics. She was also a spring 2023 Mellon Fellow at Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU and co-curator of the first solo exhibition of Vincentian artist and photographer Nadia Huggins, titled Coral & Ash, on view from April 25- December 2 2023 at the KJCC, New York University.

Julia Hamer-Light is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware, where her dissertation considers the life and work of Oglala Lakota artist-educator Arthur Amiotte (b. 1942). Her project engages his experiments with fiber wall hangings and pedagogy to reveal new connections between emerging discourses on multiple modernisms, ecocriticism, and studio craft. Julia has received research support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art and the Delaware Public Humanities Institute at the University of Delaware. Previously, she has held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Winterthur Museum, Gardens & Library, and the University Museums of the University of Delaware. She earned her BA in American Studies from Yale University in 2018. Starting this fall, she will be the 2024-2025 American Craft Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Jessica M. Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Oregon, specializing in Early Modern European art with an emphasis on eighteenth-century British portraiture. Her research often focuses on portraiture to explore themes such as gender, race, identity, empire, and early globalization. Johnson’s dissertation examines portraits of Blacks who belonged to the upper echelons of British society to consider the intersection of race and class, as well as the formation and complexities of Black identity in Georgian Britain. Her dissertation aims to utilize portraiture to explore how wealthy and influential Blacks perceived and fashioned themselves and, in turn, were perceived within British society during a period in which whites enriched themselves through colonialism and Black enslavement. She received her BA in Art History from Boston University in 2017 and her MA in Art and Museum Studies from Georgetown University in 2018. Johnson has interned at various art institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Christie’s, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is a recipient of the University of Oregon’s Promising Scholar Award, the Smithsonian’s Minority Award, and a finalist for the Marshall Scholarship.

Sarah Molina is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation explores how carpets shaped experiences of space in Safavid Iran (1501- 1722). Her research has been supported by Harvard University’s Traveling and Merit Term-Time Fellowship programs, the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Art & Architecture, the Hajji Baba Club, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, the American Research Institute in Türkiye, and the Persian Heritage Foundation.

Sarah has held various positions and fellowships in museums, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Her work in museums has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon, Samuel H. Kress, and National Science Foundations. She has helped organize major exhibitions on diverse subjects, from Safavid carpets to contemporary photography and Central Asian jewelry. She also has extensive experience in the technical study of objects, having conducted structural and material analyses of textiles in conservation labs, participated in specialized workshops for manuscript studies, and completed courses at the Gemological Institute of America. Sarah will be the 2024-2025 Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Roko Rumora is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago and a visiting scholar in the Antiquities Department of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he is co-authoring a catalog of the museum’s Roman marble sculpture. His research focuses on the maintenance and upkeep of public collections of marble statuary in the cities of Roman Anatolia. His dissertation project, “Spacing Statues: Interpreting Curatorial Interventions on Roman Aedicular Façades,” examines how local communities organized their rich sculptural heritage through purpose-built galleries where new, re-used and repaired statues were displayed side by side. Roko has curated exhibitions at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in Chicago and at the Getty Villa Museum in Malibu.

Nzinga Simmons is an independent curator and art history scholar based in Durham, North Carolina. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Simmons’ research examines black contemporary artists working in New Media; that is, making use of the internet, non-fungible tokens (NFT), artificial intelligence (AI), and other forms of digital technologies in their practice. Her work considers how these artists refuse the assumed neutrality of technological systems and conceptualize the digital realm as a context uniquely primed for the assertion of black futurity. Amid an influx contemporary discourse examining technology’s pernicious influence, Simmons’ research opens new ways of conceptualizing technology as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their agency and subjectivity in the digital realm and beyond. Prior to graduate studies, Simmons was awarded the Tina Dunkley Curatorial Fellowship in American Art and served in the curatorial departments at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia.

Cambra Sklarz is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside where she focuses on American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her dissertation, “The Artist and the Ecosystem: Strategies for the Use and Reuse of Materials in Early America,” draws upon her interests in ecocritical art history, materials and technical art history, and material culture. Currently, she is the Diane and Michael Maher Curatorial Fellow of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums, where she works with the curators of American art and prints. Cambra has recently completed fellowships at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. She has held positions at a number of Southern California arts institutions, including the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, the Getty Museum, and California Lawyers for the Arts. She earned a MA in art history from The George Washington University, a JD from UCLA School of Law, and her BA from Tufts University.

Holli Turner is a doctoral candidate at The Pennsylvania State University. She is a specialist in the art of early modern Europe, with an emphasis on Italian and Spanish painting, and a secondary interest in the art of colonial Latin America. Her dissertation is a revisionist account of the Venetian painter Titian’s poesie for King Philip II of Spain – written from the perspective of the labor, and laborers, involved in mining and processing the artist’s pigments and colorants (though she will also dwell on representations of landscapes, and bodies, in the paintings).

Apart from using traditional methods, like archival research, this project draws insights from the material turn, technical art history, Black- and postcolonial studies. Titian’s paintings, she argues, are the result of expertise spanning continents; and they carry the residue of violence, exploitation, and geo-political tensions characteristic of Philip II’s empire. She has also worked to ensure that underrepresented groups see themselves reflected in staffing, collections, and exhibition programming at museums. Holli’s doctoral research has been supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas, Mellon, and Kress Foundations, and the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State. She received her B.A., B.F.A., and M.A. from Old Dominion University.

Xin Yue (Sylvia) Wang is an art history PhD candidate specializing in medieval art at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is an interdisciplinary study that examines medieval Last Supper depictions through lenses of medieval theology, divine-human relationships, and liturgical practices. She is at the end of a two-year curatorial fellowship at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, where she has created detailed catalogue entries for the medieval manuscript collection. She is also curating a small exhibition that examines manuscript production across time and culture, featuring seven manuscript leaves in Latin, Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, and Ge’ez. Before starting her PhD, she worked at many non-profit and for-profit art institutions, including the Met Cloisters, Christie’s, and the Guggenheim Museum. Her career goal is to bring medieval art to a wider audience. Her Chinese translation of A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, written by the renowned manuscript scholar Christopher de Hamel, was published in April 2023. This book is now the first major survey on medieval manuscript illumination in Chinese. She aspires to curate travelling exhibitions and educational programs on medieval art and global art history in different continents, especially Asia.

Margot Yale is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California. She studies American art in the twentieth century, with particular interests in printmaking, histories of the Left and organized labor, and pedagogy and community-oriented practice. Her dissertation “From Red Feminism to the Blacklist: Labor Schools and the Work of Art, 1935–1957,” considers how women artists surveilled and blacklisted by the federal government under McCarthyism built solidarity with multiracial working-class audiences through pedagogy and the structural logic of the multiple. Her project is supported by a 2024–2025 Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, Special Collections at the University of Michigan, and the Visual Studies Research Institute at USC. She has held positions at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a cataloguer of drawings and prints. She has also curated exhibitions at Equity Gallery, New York, Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn (with the No Longer Empty Curatorial Lab), and the Princeton University Art Museum. Margot received her BA in art history and American Studies from Princeton University.