CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

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.

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 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 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.