CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

Melissa M. Ramos Borges is a PhD candidate in the Programa de Estudios artísticos, literarios y culturales of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid specializing in Puerto Rican contemporary art. In her dissertation “Oversight or Censorship: A Review of the Artistic Avant-Garde in Puerto Rico, 1960-1970”, she seeks to correct misconceptions regarding the experimental art produced in the island by rescuing and unveiling a large -but mostly unexamined- body of work created by a group of Puerto Rican artists. Although these artists addressed local issues and reacted to shared social contexts, local colleagues considered them transgressors and questioned their Puerto Ricanness (puertorriqueñidad) which, she argues, contributed to posteriori-censoring by art historians. She holds a BA in History of Latin American and Caribbean Art from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, a BA in Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Melissa is an adjunct professor at the Art History Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.  She has curated and co-curated exhibitions in various institutions in her native Puerto Rico.

Danny Smith is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University where he studies medieval Italian art. His dissertation, “Dreaming in Public in Late Medieval Rome,” considers monumental depictions of dreams and dreaming in thirteenth-century Rome within shifting theological, scientific, and political conceptions of dreaming in the Middle Ages. Prior to Stanford, Danny held curatorial internships at the Williams College Museum of Art and deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum and served as a studio assistant for the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. He received a BA in Art History and Studio Art from Carleton College and an MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Hannah Yohalem is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Movement and Arrest: Jasper Johns, 1954-1968.” The dissertation argues that a sustained engagement with restricted motion structured Johns’s early art, which not only illuminates his entire corpus, but also clarifies the historical relationship between bodily restriction and mobility and art in the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s. Her research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, while her writing has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Performa Magazine, and a forthcoming edition of MoMA Highlights: 350 Works from the Museum of Modern Art. Hannah has run educational programming at the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico as well as interning in curatorial departments at MoMA and the National Gallery. She holds a BA in Art and Architecture from Harvard University. 

Alisa Chiles is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in modern architecture and decorative arts. She holds a BA in Art History from Stanford University and an MA in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Her dissertation, “On Duels and Designs: French and German Modernism at the Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition, Paris 1930,” has received support from the Smithsonian and the Decorative Arts Trust. It examines the Deutscher Werkbund’s 1930 Parisian exhibition in the context of the national rivalry between France and Germany, and considers how this rivalry stimulated the invention of new artistic forms during the early twentieth century. She is also interested in war memorials and recently published an article on French Beaux-Arts architect Paul Cret’s WWI war memorial designs. Prior to studying at Penn, Alisa worked for six years in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also worked for the George Nakashima Foundation, and interned at the Musée d’Orsay, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna House in Stanford, CA.

J. English Cook is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where she specializes in intersections between architecture, cinema, and urban theory. Her dissertation examines the impact of cinema on the postwar spread of phenomenology, particularly as expressed in architects’ re-articulation of notions of spatial experience. These overlaps, she argues, have an under-examined prehistory in the intertwined practices of interwar filmmakers and architects. She previously received an MA with distinction from the Institute of Fine Arts and a BA with highest honors from Williams College, where her research was awarded the S. Lane Faison, Jr. 1929 Prize.

A native of Atlanta, Georgia, she has worked as a curatorial assistant in modern and contemporary art at the High Museum, Atlanta and as the assistant commissioner for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. She has produced performances at Momentum Worldwide, a time-based media gallery in Berlin, curated a traveling exhibition of paintings by Winston Churchill, and interned in curatorial departments at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Williams College Museum of Art, as well as for the online English language journal of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Ashley Dimmig is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan, where she focuses on the art and architecture of Islamic cultures, under the direction of Professor Christiane Gruber. As the 2017–2019 Ittleson Fellow at CASVA, she is currently working on her dissertation, “Making Modernity in Fabric Architecture: Imperial Tents in the Late Ottoman Period”—a subject she has begun to explore in an article published in theInternational Journal of Islamic Architecturein 2014. Ashley holds two Master of Art degrees from Indiana University Bloomington and Koç University in Istanbul, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in art history and Fiber studio art from the Kansas City Art Institute.

Xiaohan is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, specializing in Chinese art and Japanese art, with a focus on medieval Sino-Japanese exchanges. Her dissertation “On A Snowy Night: Yishan Yining (1247-1317) and the Development of Zen Calligraphy in Medieval Japan” examines the life and work of an expatriate Chinese priest who went to Japan in 1299 as an imperial envoy for the Yuan court; his practice as a calligrapher in Japan is pivotal in the transformation of calligraphy from a semantic tool into a symbolic cultural product central to the self-fashioning of Zen priests who came after him, testifying to the abiding power and potential of this age-old art form that has long been venerated in the East Asian cultural sphere. 

Xiaohan received her BA with Honors in Art History from Hamilton College in 2012; she studied French and European art in Paris, where she had an internship with Museé Guimet. She has also interned in the Chinese works of art department at Christie’s New York office, the Japanese and Korean painting department at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, and the curatorial department at Kyoto National Museum.

Christopher Green is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Native American art, the representation and display of Indigenous culture, and primitivisms of the historic and neo-avant-garde. His dissertation, “Masked Moderns: Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival,” examines the interplay between Euro-American modernism and Native American art of the Pacific Northwest through a series of Indigenous artists who in the years 1960–1990 drew on modernist aesthetic procedures to complicate notions of authenticity, identity, and tradition. His scholarly essays and criticism have appeared inArt in America,The Brooklyn Rail,ARTMargins, andWinterthur Portfolio, amongst others, and he is the co-editor of Issue 11 ofSHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, “BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL.” He recently contributed a catalogue essay and public program to the exhibition “Unholding” at Artists Space, and he will be a 2018–2019 Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian.

Leila Anne Harris is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at The Graduate Center, City University of New York specializing in the history of photography. Her dissertation, “Labor and the Picturesque: Photography, Propaganda, and the Tea Industry in Colonial India and Sri Lanka, 1880-1914,” considers how photographs functioned as nationalistic propaganda advertising the merits of British-grown tea through a romanticization of colonial labor and a celebration of industry in the British Empire. Her research has been recognized with support from the Social Sciences Research Council, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She holds a BA with Highest Distinction in Art History and Studio Art from the University of Virginia. Before pursuing graduate studies she was an Aunspaugh Fellow at the University of Virginia and worked in a professional photography lab. More recently, she has worked as a curatorial intern at the Museum of Modern Art and as a fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum. In fall 2018 she will be a visiting scholar at the Yale Center for British Art.

Diana Mellon is a PhD candidate and graduate instructor at Columbia University, where she studies Medieval and Renaissance Italian art. Her dissertation examines the relationship between 14th- and 15th-century paintings depicting healing and vernacular healthcare practices during the period. Diana has held the positions of Ayesha Bulchandani Graduate Curatorial Intern at the Frick Collection, Joseph F. McCrindle Curatorial Intern at the National Gallery of Art, and Nancy Horton Bartels Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. She has also worked at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the American Academy in Rome, and DEPART Foundation in Italy. She received her BA in the History of Art from Yale University.

Jun P. Nakamura is assistant curator of Prints and Drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum. Prior to his appointment at Princeton, Jun was Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow in Prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where he curated Macho Men: Hypermasculinity in Dutch and American Prints (2022–2023), and co-curated Pictures in Pictures (2022), Expressions (2021), and Of God & Country: American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection (2023). Previously, he held positions at Leiden University and the National Gallery of Art. He earned a PhD in art history from the University of Michigan (2022), with a dissertation on the use and meaning of professional engraving style in the seventeenth-century Netherlands and beyond. He holds an MA in art history from Southern Methodist University and a BFA in fashion design and art history from Washington University in St. Louis.

Galina Olmsted is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Delaware and a specialist in nineteenth-century European art. Her dissertation, “Making and Exhibiting Modernism: Gustave Caillebotte in Paris, New York, and Brussels,” evaluates Caillebotte’s art- and exhibition-making as interconnected forms of modern artistic expression and her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Material Culture Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. Prior to beginning her doctoral work, she earned a BA in English and Art History from Georgetown University and an MA in Art History and Museum Studies from Case Western Reserve University. She has held curatorial positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the University of Delaware Museums, where she curated an exhibition of contemporary prints in the spring of 2018.

Rachel Patt is a doctoral candidate specializing in Roman art history at Emory University. Her dissertation, “Meaning, Materiality, and Pothos in Late Antique Gold Glass Portraits,” focuses on the discrete handful of gold glass roundels bearing portraits of private individuals. In 2017, she held a Mellon Fellowship in Object-Centered Curatorial Research, studying a gold-band glass alabastron at the Michael C. Carlos Museum. Rachel received her BA in Classics with distinction from Stanford University in 2009. During her senior year, she guest-curated the exhibition “Appellations from Antiquity” at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center, exploring appropriation of Classical mythology in modern art. Rachel received her MA in Classical and Byzantine Art History with merit from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in 2011. She has held multiple volunteer curatorial internships at the Getty Villa, Malibu, and a Graduate Curatorial Internship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and worked from 2012–2014 at the Visual Resources Center of Stanford’s Art & Architecture Library.

Chloé M. Pelletier is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago concentrating on Italian Renaissance art. Originally from Texas, she received her BA in the History of Art with departmental honors from Johns Hopkins University (2013). At the University of Chicago, she wrote her MA thesis on the influence of Early Renaissance painting in the work of 20th-century Chicago artist Roger Brown (2016). She is interested in artists who worked outside of large urban centers and developed independent styles that have been historically labeled ‘provincial.’ Building on these interests, her dissertation examines the elaborate but often overlooked landscape backgrounds of Adriatic Renaissance paintings as a means of investigating the relationship of environment to artistic practice. Beyond the University of Chicago, she has held research positions at the Blanton Museum in Austin, the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She will be spending next year in Urbino, Italy on a Fulbright fellowship.

Anni Pullagura is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. She holds a Master’s in Public Humanities from Brown University and a Bachelor’s in Art History from Emory University, and is currently pursuing a Master’s in the History of Art and Architecture, also from Brown University. Her dissertation, “Seeing Feeling: The Work of Empathy in Exhibitionary Spaces,” explores the intersection of moral philosophy and visual culture in the art encounter, examining how feelings attach to narratives and subjects in contemporary art and media. An advocate for social justice in museums, she has worked in various cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Atlanta History Center, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. Currently, she is a curatorial fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.