CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

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 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 specializes in European art from 1400 to 1800, with a particular focus on portraiture. Following his participation in the CCL seminar, he completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University with a dissertation on how Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1528) merchant portraits navigated the moral tensions of a profession both celebrated for its economic contributions and criticized for its perceived associations with greed and materialism. His broader research interests include the socio-political and scientific dimensions of early modern German, Italian, and British art. Before pursuing his doctorate, Mateusz studied art history in Vienna and Cambridge (UK), and gained curatorial experience at leading Austrian institutions, including the Belvedere Gallery, Klosterneuburg Abbey, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. He has recently returned to the latter as Junior Curator of European Painting (1400–1800).

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 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 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 CE, Crowns of the Vajra Masters: Ritual Art of Nepal, An Artist of Her Time: Y.G. Srimati and the Indian Style, Encountering 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Kylie Ching is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in contemporary American art with a focus on Asian American art and visual culture. Her dissertation examines how Asian diasporic visual artists critically reexamine and respond to American wars in the Asia-Paci c by engaging with private family photographs and wartime journalistic photography. She argues that her case studies, as products of gendered knowledge and memory keeping, center notions of family to o er alternative mappings of war and belonging. Kylie holds a M.A. in Art History and a B.A. in Art History and English from UC Irvine. Previously, she has held curatorial and registrar internships at the San Diego Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, and UCI’s Institute and Museum of California Art.

Lesdi Carolina Goussen Robleto is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She works on modern and contemporary art in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a focus on experimental, mixed-media, and performance practices in Central America. Her dissertation, (Un)mending Bodies: Patricia Belli and Feminist Artistic Praxis in Central America, 1986-2000s, looks at the work of the contemporary Nicaraguan artist, Patricia Belli, against the backdrop of postwar Nicaragua. Tending to fiber and craft-based materialities in the artist oeuvre, the dissertation considers how Belli’s work gives texture to counter-poetics of resistance that unravel national aesthetics and socio-political discourses. The project places Belli’s work in conversation with other Central American women artists that re-work everyday materials to find expression at the nexus of social and political transition.

In 2019, Lesdi helped organize About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a Gallery Assistant at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco and previously interned in the Education Department at the de Young Museum.

Lesdi is a 2021 Ford Fellow and a recipient of the AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship. She holds a BA in Art History from New York University and an MA from the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bianca Hand is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art focusing on ancient Mesopotamian art. Her research focuses on investigating questions of alterity, materiality, style, and interaction at the royal palace at Khorsabad during the reign of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II (721-705 BCE). She received her bachelor’s degree in archaeology with minors in art history and French from the College of Wooster. There, she received a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates Award to excavate and conduct research for her senior capstone thesis. Her field work has also led her to Turkey, where she worked with the Tayinat Archaeological Project and the Hatay Archaeological Museum on the Basalt Reconstruction Project to reconstruct a monumental statue of an unidentified queen.