CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

Jamal Batts is a curator, writer, and doctoral candidate in the Department African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. His dissertation project, Immoral Panics: Black Queer Aesthetics and the Construction of Risk, reflects on the relation between blackness, queerness, contemporary art, and the intricacies of sexual risk and risk-taking. His writing has appeared in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibit Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, ASAP/J, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series. He is a 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, 2020 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and ONE National Lesbian & Gay Archives LGBTQ Research Fellow. In 2019 he served as the SFMOMA Summer Curatorial Intern in Contemporary Art where he curated film screenings and artist discussions for the exhibit SOFT POWER. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic. 

Laura Beltran-Rubio specializes in the history of art and fashion in the early modern Spanish World. She is a doctoral candidate at the College of William and Mary and received her MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design. Her dissertation explores the adoption and adaptation of European fashions, their fusion with local indigenous elements of dress, and their representation in portraits and pictures of types in the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Laura has taught a number of courses on the history of fashion and fashion studies at Parsons and the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Her research has been published in Fashion Theory and The Journal of Dress History and has been generously funded by Colfuturo, Parsons, William & Mary, and the Costume Society of America. Internships at El Museo del Barrio and the Metropolitan Museum of Art sparked Laura’s interest in curatorial work. 

Hyunjin Cho is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University, where she specializes in visual cultures of the Islamic world. Her dissertation examines the sociopolitical significance of illustrated Shahnama manuscripts from nineteenth-century Iran and argues that these objects serve as key expressions of identity and power during that period of modernization. Her research has been supported by several awards, including BU’s Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship and travel grants from BU’s Pardee School of Global Studies. In the 2020-2021 academic year, she will continue her archival research by visiting libraries and museums in Europe, the Caucasus, and India. Prior to her doctoral studies, she held positions and internships at the Boston University Art Galleries, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art, Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center, and the Queens Museum of Art in New York. She holds a B.A. in Art History and Economics from Wesleyan University and an M.A. from Boston University. 

Emily Friedman is a PhD candidate in the history of art at Johns Hopkins University, where she studies northern European art of the early modern period. Her dissertation, “Transformations: Art, Enigma and Intellectual Culture in Lyon, 1500-1550”, positions artist-engravers in Lyon within the intellectual environment of their city, where an interest in alchemy and enigma shaped an ambitious and reflexive artistic practice that was expressed in the very works they produced. Her research has been supported by the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe and she is the recipient of a two-year Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellowship (2020-2022). Emily received her BA in art history and English literature from McGill University, has held curatorial internships at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and served as the assistant editor for 032c Magazine, a contemporary culture magazine published in Berlin. She is the current Carlson/Cowart Fellow in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

Kendra Greendeer (Ho-Chunk) is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History with a focus on contemporary Native women artists, the transformation of spaces, and decolonial museum practices. Her curatorial and academic work encompasses Native American arts and the history of the United States. Kendra earned her B.F.A. in Museum Studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and M.A. in Art and Museum Studies from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. 

Nora Lambert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in late medieval and early modern Italy. Her research interests include cross-cultural interaction between Italy and the Islamic Mediterranean, as well as issues of patronage and reception, such as collecting, display, and gift exchange. Nora’s dissertation, “Picturing Mobility: Late Medieval and Renaissance Naples at the Threshold of the Mediterranean,” explores the wide circulation and transcontinental nature of Neapolitan commissions and collections. Her essay on the depiction of crusading in the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral was published by Ashgate Press in 2015. Prior to arriving at the University of Chicago, she held positions at museums including the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and several New York City collections. Nora is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, where she is curating the 2021 exhibition, Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe. 

Rebecca is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean world. Her research centers around Greek sculpture of the Classical and Hellenistic periods, as well as the reception of classical antiquity in Europe and the United States. She has excavated, drafted, and assisted with survey in Greece (Athenian Agora, Samothrace) and Italy (Gabii, Pompeii). Levitan received her B.A. in Art History from Emory University and her M.Litt in Ancient History from the University of St Andrews. She was the Edward Capps Associate Student Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 2019-2020 and a CAORC Multi-Country grant recipient in 2018. 

Emily is a doctoral student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh under the supervision of Professor Kirk Savage. She specializes in the art of the United States, with a particular interest in political portraiture and exhibition history. While in residence at the University of Pittsburgh, she served as the 2018-2019 A.W. Mellon Fellow in Curation and Education. Her dissertation examines the identity politics of the Smithsonian’s First Ladies Hall, analyzing the intractable issues of gender and power in American society. Emily received her MA in Art History from the University of Connecticut. Her master’s thesis, “Enabling Authority: Ellen Emmet Rand, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Power of Portraiture,” explored questions of female creative agency, cultural memory, and the representation of non-normative bodies. She has previously held internship positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, as well as a curatorial fellowship at the Fitchburg Art Museum. Her research and curatorial practice is committed to museum social responsibility and activism. 

Anthony Meyer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he specializes in the indigenous arts of the Americas and the global Early Modern. His dissertation, “The Givers of Things’: Tlamacazque Art, Architecture, and Religious Modes of Making in the Mexica and Early Transatlantic Worlds,” examines the art and architecture crafted, shaped, and transformed by Nahua religious leaders, or tlamacazque, over the course of the Mexica empire (A.D. 1325- 1521), as well as the impacts these figures had in sixteenth-century New Spain and the wider Euro-Atlantic. Outside of his dissertation, Anthony’s research interests include semiotics and linguistic relativity, spatial and bodily experiences, transatlantic exchange, and the materiality of religions. Anthony has worked at institutions such as El Museo del Barrio and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, as well as most recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on an international exhibition titled Forces of Nature: Ancient Maya Arts from LACMA. He also holds a B.A. in Archaeology and Anthropology with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he curated a thesis on Maya ceramics and their fraught portrayals in museums. 

Ramey Mize is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in nineteenth-century U.S., Latin American, and Native American art. Her dissertation, “War and Witness in American Visual Culture, 1861–1901,” illuminates the multiplicity of artistic representations and challenges surrounding three conflicts that shaped U.S. history: the Civil War, the Black Hills War, and the Spanish-Cuban-American- Filipino War. Broadly, the project explores how works of art functioned as testimony to these events of historical rupture, across socio-cultural borders and an increasingly complex media landscape. She is a 2020–21 Douglass Foundation Fellow in American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her research has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Previously, she has held curatorial fellowships and positions at the Colby College Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She holds a B.A. with Highest Honors in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her M.A. with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. 

Sayantan Mukhopadhyay is the Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. He graduated from UCLA with a PhD in Art History in 2022, where his dissertation was titled "Making Worlds, Making Way: Queer Belongings in Indian Contemporary Art (1980-2000)." He further holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Art History from Williams College, from which he graduated cum laude with honors.

Catherine Popovici is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in the visual culture of ancient Mesoamerica. By bridging the dichotomy between ceremonial centers and the surrounding world, her dissertation explores how sculpture beyond the urban center became a crucial component of Classic Maya ritual and kingship. Catherine is the 2020- 2022 Ittleson Fellow at CASVA and from September 2018 to May 2019 she was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum. Catherine holds a B.A. with High Honors in the History of Art from Smith College and a M.A. with a focus on Pre-Columbian and Colonial Latin American Art and Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University. 

Katherine Werwie is a PhD candidate in the history of art and architecture at Yale University specializing in medieval sculpture. Her dissertation, “Visions Across the Gates: Historiated Wooden Doors of Medieval European Churches,” examines embodied interactions with sculpture, spatialized ritual, and the materiality of the medium of wood through a group of ten doors created between the 11th and 13th centuries from Iceland to Croatia. Katherine received her BA in art history from Barnard College followed by an MPhil in the history of art from the University of Cambridge. She has worked at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and the Yale Peabody Museum and served as the Samuel H. Kress Interpretive Fellow at the Worcester Art Museum where she oversaw the reinstallation of the museum’s galleries for medieval art. 

Jennifer Baez specializes in the arts and visual culture of the early modern Ibero-Atlantic and Afro-Caribbean world (c.1500-1800), with a focus on aesthetics and practices of Christianity in late colonial contexts. Her dissertation explores miracle-making and the engagement of collective memory in eighteenth-century Hispaniola. She examines a series of cycles painted for the Virgin of Altagracia of rural Higüey to identify intersections between Marian piety, artistic practice, and the development of creole origin stories during the age of the Hispanic Enlightenment. Jennifer received her MA in art history from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her thesis on the 1955 World’s Fair in Santo Domingo considered how the Trujillo regime fashioned national identity through a visual and performative program that (re)presented colonial architecture, natural space, and the laboring, racialized, and gendered body. As a Patricia Rose Doctoral Fellow at Florida State University, Jennifer taught the Arts of Africa and The Museum Object courses. She is a recipient of the International Dissertation Semester Research Fellowship from The Graduate School and the Mason Dissertation Research Award from the Department of Art History at FSU. Her research has also recently been funded by a generous Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation Travel Award.

Tina Barouti is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University specializing in modern and contemporary Arab and African art. In 2015, she received her M.A. at Boston University, where she focused on photography during Algeria’s civil war of the nineties. In 2017-2019, Barouti conducted fieldwork in Morocco for her dissertation on the history of L’Institut National des Beaux-Arts (The National Institute of Fine Arts) in Tetouan, Morocco with the support of a U.S. Student Fulbright Fellowship, a U.S. State Department Critical Language Scholarship, a Boston University Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship, and a Boston University Graduate Arts Research Grant. Currently, Barouti is the editorial and curatorial researcher for the exhibition Moroccan Trilogy (1950-2020) at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, a consultant for Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, and a researcher for the Association of Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey’s “Mapping Art Histories” project supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative.