CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

In 2014, with the support of the Mellon Foundation, CCL launched a summer seminar intensive, which introduces art history doctoral candidates at the outset of their careers to the daily challenges and strategic questions of museum practice.

 


If you are a CCL alum and would like to update your personal or professional information for CCL's internal records and/or as they appear on CCL's website, please complete the form linked here.

Solomon Adler -

Solomon Adler

Close

Program

CCL Mellon Foundation Seminar 2023

School

University of Oxford

Mentor

Ian Alteveer, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

View Full Profile

Solomon “Zully” Adler is a curator and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, where his dissertation considers the life and work of artist Martin Wong. Adler’s projects focus on alternative and countercultural practices, principally in California during the late twentieth century. He is the recipient of the Watson Fellowship for international research on underground music objects, the Marshall Scholarship for postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge and The Glasgow School of Art, the Shorenstein Research Fellowship at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Clarendon Scholarship in support of his studies at Oxford. Previous exhibitions include Brook Hsu: Signs of Life and Melvino Garretti: Space Versus Space at Vernon Gardens, Los Angeles, as well as In Exile: Paul Klee & Other German Artists and Mythos Psyche, Eros: Jess & California, co-curated with Nancy Lim, at SFMOMA. His most recent exhibition, Redd Ekks: X, was held at Arcadia Missa, London. Adler runs the Goaty Tapes music label and House Rules press, through which he published Casual Junk & Bedroom Mythology and Charlie Nothing: State of the Ding. His anthology Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California is forthcoming.

Michelle Al-Ferzly -

Michelle Al-Ferzly

Close

Program

CCL Mellon Foundation Seminar 2023

School

University of Michigan

Mentor

Catherine Futter, Brooklyn Museum

View Full Profile

Michelle Al-Ferzly is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a specialist of medieval Islamic Art and Architecture from the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, and is writing a dissertation on the material and visual cultures of medieval Islamic foodways entitled “Taste, Touch Table: The Art of Medieval Islamic Dining, Ninth to Fifteenth Centuries”. Currently, Michelle is a Research Associate in the Medieval Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she is working on an exhibition investigating the relationships between medieval Africa and the Byzantine world. She most recently held positions at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Walters Art Museum. Michelle is the co-author of the 2021 volume, City in the Desert, Revisited: Oleg Grabar at Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, 1964-971. She holds a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.A. from Bryn Mawr College. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Barakat Trust.

Diana Iturralde -

Diana Iturralde

Close

Diana is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Rutgers University. She focuses on early modern to contemporary art from Latin America with an emphasis in the Andean-Amazon region. Her academic writing focuses on transnational cultural exchanges between the Americas and Europe from the 1860s through the 1960’s, the construction of national identities, and the long-lasting perceptions and misconceptions these have ensued in the region. Diana approaches her art historical practice interdisciplinary, in dialogue with the Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism. Her dissertation examines representations of the Amazon region in Ecuador and Peru, contemplating different perspectives and constant cultural and environmental transformations in the relational network of all earth beings, during the late nineteenth century and the present. She has interned at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the departments of Government and External Affairs, and Contemporary Art. She completed her MA in Art History at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 2018 and worked at the Institute of Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) as a Research Assistant before starting her Ph.D.

Sanniah Jabeen -

Sanniah Jabeen

Close

Program

CCL Mellon Foundation Seminar 2023

School

University of Toronto

Mentor

Paola Antonelli, Museum of Modern Art

View Full Profile

Sanniah is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research focuses on textiles from South Asia and particularly the impact of digital printing, machine-replication, and mass-production on modern and contemporary ‘folk’ crafts. Central to her research are questions of how artisans and craft communities respond to changing markets, movements across networks of craft exchange, differing forms of gendered craft labor, textiles as markers of ethnicity and nationality, and concerns over the ‘indigeneity’ of the handmade. For her dissertation, Sanniah is studying the “Ajrak,” a block-printed and resist dyed rectangular cotton textile and looking at its usage as a political tool of representation and its high- fashion appearances amidst global concerns around craft-preservation. This dissertation research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Graduate Expansion Unit at the University of Toronto. 

Sanniah has previously worked with UNESCO on projects related to craft conservation, heritage preservation and public engagement with the arts and has also completed curatorial fellowships at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Islamic Art and Material Cultural Collaborative (IAMCC), The Art Museum at the University of Toronto and the Lahore Biennale Foundation.

Rachel Kabukala -

Rachel Kabukala

Close

Rachel Kabukala is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and African Studies Program at Indiana University who studies historical and contemporary arts of Africa and the African Diaspora. Her dissertation research focuses on the design evolution and production histories of Kuba women textile artists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She previously served as Curatorial Assistant for African Art at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and has worked on multiple exhibitions during her time as a graduate student. In 2020, Rachel curated Radical Revisionists: Contemporary African Artists Confronting Past & Present at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. In 2022, she presented the first solo exhibition of the Kinshasa-based artist collective Kongo Astronauts titled Congo Gravitational Waves // A Metadigital & Tantalean Tale at the University of North Texas CVAD Galleries. Rachel is committed to engaging in collaborative curatorial practices and synergistic scholarship as means towards mutual liberation and positive transformation for our shared future.

Mateusz Mayer -

Mateusz Mayer

Close

Mateusz is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University specializing in European portraiture of the early modern period. His dissertation examines how especially Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1528) activity as a portraitist provides insights into early modern conceptions of selfhood, beauty, physiognomy, friendship, virtue, and vice, as well as gender norms and racial prejudice. Mateusz holds a Magister degree in Art History from the University of Vienna and an MPhil in Art History from the University of Cambridge. Prior to pursuing his doctorate, he worked in the curatorial departments of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Austrian National Gallery Belvedere, and Klosterneuburg Abbey. He has since held fellowships in Venice, Italy, at Casa Muraro and the Rosand Library & Study Center of Save Venice Inc. In 2019, he co- curated an exhibition at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library on Columbia University’s collection of British portraits. His research is currently generously funded by the C.V. Starr Foundation.

Angela Pastorelli-Sosa -

Angela Pastorelli-Sosa

Close

Angela Pastorelli-Sosa is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. She specializes in modern and contemporary art of the Americas and the Caribbean, with a focus on conceptual and mixed media practices. Her dissertation examines four Latinx artists whose works mobilize historical objects as entry points for linking overdetermined constructions of geographies to essentialized notions of identity. These artists reconfigure normative representations of land to explore how spaces–such as borders, commonwealths, and urban environments–continue to be contested via racialized, gendered bodies. This project reads its objects of study as spatial practices that map borderless futures.

Angela is a 2022 recipient of the Luce/ ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. In 2019, she helped organize About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Previously, Angela worked as a gallery assistant in New York and held a curatorial internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds a BA in Art History from Williams College and an MA from the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. 

Vaishnavi Patil -

Vaishnavi Patil

Close

Program

CCL Mellon Foundation Seminar 2023

School

Harvard University

Mentor

Joan Cummins, Brooklyn Museum

View Full Profile

Vaishnavi Patil is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, pursuing research in the art of South and Southeast Asia. Her dissertation delves into the role of the mother goddess in South Asian religions, particularly focusing on the mother-child imagery of the first to the tenth century CE. Her research seeks to understand the networks of transmissions of ideas and imagery, the role of artists, patrons, and devotees in shaping religion, and the reciprocity and connectedness in the religions of South Asia through the sacred feminine. She is a recipient of grants from the Porter Research Travel Fellowship, Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute, and the Asia Center.

Beyond her dissertation, Vaishnavi has conducted extensive research on South Asian paintings and drawings from the 15th-18th centuries through her work with the Mapping Color in History project. She was also a Research Assistant for the exhibition Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE (2023) in the Asian Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has an interest in the artistic connections across Asia through the Buddhist world and has worked as a Curatorial Assistant on Southeast Asian Art at the Harvard Art Museums. Before joining Harvard, Vaishnavi pursued her B.A. in Ancient Indian History and Culture at St. Xavier’s College Mumbai, an M.A. in History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS, London, and an M.A. in China Studies as a Yenching scholar at Peking University.

Kalyani Madhura Ramachandran -

Kalyani Madhura Ramachandran

Close

Kalyani is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation investigates the earliest sculptural history of Deccan (south) India and focuses on ancient Buddhist sites in the region (3rd century BCE – 4th century CE). She also holds a minor in British art (18th – 19th centuries) with an interest in the colonial understanding of antiquity. Her research has been supported by the Dean’s Fellowship, École Française d’Extrême-Orient Field Scholarship, Steven Kossak Graduate Fellowship, Lee MacCormick Edwards Summer Fellowship, and the American Institute of Indian Studies Language Program. Kalyani was formerly a Research Assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she worked on five exhibitions; Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE – 400 CECrowns of the Vajra Masters: Ritual Art of Nepal, An Artist of Her Time: Y.G. Srimati and the Indian StyleEncountering Vishnu: The Lion Avatar in Indian Temple Drama, and The Royal Hunt: Courtly Pursuits in Indian Art. She has a B.A. from the University of Delhi, where she received the Department of History Prize, and an MPhil from the University of Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship. Kalyani will be the 2023 – 2024 Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Arianna Ray -

Arianna Ray

Close

Program

CCL Mellon Foundation Seminar 2023

School

Northwestern University

Mentor

Aimee Ng, The Frick Collection

View Full Profile

Arianna Ray is a PhD candidate in art history at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on early modern Northern European art and its engagement with the Atlantic world. She is particularly interested in prints and their role as conduits of identity, propaganda, and racialization. Her dissertation investigates how the color binary inherent to printmaking epidermalized race in engravings, etchings, and mezzotints of African diasporic peoples in the early modern Dutch Atlantic. Outside of her dissertation interests, Arianna researches Indigeneity, cartography, and transatlantic exchange in Colonial New Spain. Arianna holds a B.A. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel and an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked at various museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Harry Ransom Research Center, the Orlando Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Isabella Robbins -

Isabella Robbins

Close

Isabella Shey Robbins is a Diné scholar and PhD candidate in the History of Art and American Studies departments at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Relationality and Being: Indigeneity, Space and Transit in Global Contemporary Art,” considers how artists engage with their own communities and others within and across the settler states of the United States, Canada, and Australia. Guiding her research are questions of the limits of sovereignty and definitions of Indigeneity, the politics of refusal and opacity, and the intersections of mobility, diaspora and global Indigeneity. She has held curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and Cantor Arts Center. She proudly serves on the board of the Chapter House - L.A. and the Diné Studies Conference, Inc. She has written for First American Art Magazine, the Yale University Art Gallery Magazine, and Fort Gansevoort. Isabella earned a BA in Art History from Stanford University and an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University.

Lily Scott -

Lily Scott

Close

Program

CCL Mellon Foundation Seminar 2023

School

Temple University

Mentor

Erica DiBenedetto, Museum of Modern Art

View Full Profile

Lily F. Scott (she/they) is a Ph.D. candidate at Temple University specializing in American Modernism, with a focus on queer art and artists. Their dissertation, “Neither Then nor Now: Queer Temporalities & Interwar Portraits of Expatriate Sapphists,” examines the portraiture of/by queer American women artists living in 1920s Paris. She has taught undergraduate courses at Temple and University of the Arts, and previously worked as an art educator at The Barnes Foundation. Lily is the 2021-2023 Barra American Art Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, curating the installation Seeing with Empathy: The Female Gaze in American Modernism, which considers the ways in which eight American artists employed a non-objectifying and empathetic female gaze upon their women subjects. At PMA they also founded the Queer Representation in Art Learning Community (QRALC), a multi-departmental group dedicated to exploring the queer narratives threaded throughout the museum’s collection and to presenting them to the public via online content, gallery leaflets, audio tours, public programming, and social media posts. Internally, QRALC also focuses on metadata and cataloguing, staff talks and tours, retail, and public-facing imagery.

Elizabeth D. Smith -

Elizabeth D. Smith

Close

Elizabeth D. Smith is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture Department at the University of California Santa Barbara, specializing in American art, craft, and material culture of the twentieth century. Her dissertation, “Build/Live/Work: Artist-Built Environments and the Expanded Vernacular in the Twentieth Century,” examines the ways self-taught artists’ home and studio sites intersected with roadway and waterway expansion projects in the United States, and in turn, offers new perspectives on regional identity, mobility, gentrification, and tourism during the postwar era. Her project is supported by a 2022-2023 Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a 2023-2024 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. Previously, she has held curatorial fellowships and positions at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut, The Johnson Collection in South Carolina, and the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky. Elizabeth received her M.A. degree from the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville.

Natalie Wright -

Natalie Wright

Close

Natalie Wright is a doctoral candidate of Design History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her dissertation titled, “Functional Fashions: Dress and Disability in the United States, 1950 - 1975” historicizes the concept of “function” by revealing the significant role that it played in the social construction of disability. It brings to light a national campaign involving leaders in the fields of design, medicine, and public policy that sought to increase disabled Americans’ public visibility and participation through their improved dress. Wright’s doctoral work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library. She has held curatorial positions at the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, the Chipstone Foundation, and the Canadian Museum of History. Wright is also a contributing editor of Material Intelligence magazine. Before joining the University of Wisconsin—Madison, Wright received her MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and her BA from the University of Toronto, Trinity College. Beginning in September, Wright will be the 2023-2024 George Gurney Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Yifan Zou -

Yifan Zou

Close

Yifan Zou is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago, where she studies Chinese art and architecture under the supervision of Wu Hung. Her dissertation, “Competing for Fame: Iconic Timber Pavilions in Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” examines the development of iconic pavilions across artistic and literary mediums in China since the Tang dynasty, and explores how architecture is both a practice of building and representation. Yifan is interested in how art history, as an academic discipline, can accommodate research interests that extend across conventional boundaries between image, object, architecture, and culture. Beyond Chinese art, Yifan’s article “Pyramids, Mountains, and Sight Lines: The Diachronic Evolution of Teotihuacan’s Monumental Structures” appeared in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, further exemplifying her interdisciplinary research approach. Yifan earned her MA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BSoSci with First Class Honors from the University of Hong Kong, where she double-majored in Geography and Fine Arts. She has also interned at the Princeton University Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Yifan is the 2022-23 Mellon COSI Research Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.