CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol is a Ph.D. candidate in History of Art at the University of Michigan, specializing in modern and contemporary art. Kenji’s work focuses on the relationship of artistic practice to intimate and infrastructural manifestations of empire, diaspora, and religion in Southeast Asia. His dissertation, “Fernando Zóbel and Chang Saetang: Religious Modernity and the Mediation of Belief,” advances a comparative history of postwar abstract art across Hispano-Filipino and Sino-Thai diasporic corridors. Kenji is a recipient of research and travel grants from the Tate Research Centre Asia-Pacific, the National Research Council of Thailand, and the American National Council for History of Art, among others. He has worked on curatorial and educational projects at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Hood Museum of Art, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center, and Jim Thompson Art Center. Kenji’s published writing has been featured inArtforum. 

Christine Robinson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on the history of photography. She earned a B.F.A. with Distinction in Photography from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and an M.A. in Art History from UCLA. Prior to her graduate studies, she held an internship at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and worked on numerous exhibitions as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Most recently, she served as the Yvonne and Harry Lenart Graduate Fellow and as a curatorial project assistant in the Department of Modern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Christine is currently at work on her dissertation—a monographic study of the contemporary photographic work of Sarah Charlesworth.

Jennifer Saracino graduated with her B.A. in Art History and Minor in Spanish from the University of Southern California. From 2008–2010, she served as curatorial assistant in the Anthropology Department at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County where she assisted with the re-installation of their Ancient Latin American collection. Currently, she is working towards her joint Ph.D. in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth H. Boone. Her dissertation focuses on the map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (c. 1550) housed at the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. Jennifer has secondary interests in issues of cultural patrimony and museum ethics. In 2012, she attended the Tulane-Siena Institute for International Law, Cultural Heritage & the Arts in Siena, Italy. Jennifer has received research fellowships from the Newberry Library (Chicago, IL) and John Carter Brown Library (Providence, Rhode Island). She was a Junior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. from 2015–2016. 

Anita N. Bateman is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She specializes in African art and the art of the African diaspora with additional interests in modern and contemporary photography. Her dissertation, “Ethiopia in Focus: Photography, Nationalism, Diaspora, and Modernization,” examines the Marxist-Leninist pasts of Ethiopia and Eritrea, their current statuses as burgeoning centers of art, and ethnic/cultural identity. She has been awarded the Pre-Doctoral Research Development Grant and the Graduate Studies Enhancement Grant from the Social Science Research Council, and is a Mellon Mays Fellow and an alumna of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers. Anita has interned at the Williams College Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum, and the non-profit organization, UrbanArt Commission, in Memphis, TN. Her published work has been featured in theInternational Review of African-American Artand in theJournal of Black Studies. She holds a B.A. with distinction in Art from Williams College and an M.A. in the History of Art from Duke University.

Layla Bermeo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation, “Images without Borders: North American Art & the U.S.-Mexican War,” has been supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Layla is the co-creator of Harvard’s “Black History/Art History Lecture & Performance Series,” and she has worked in galleries and museums, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. 

Margot Bernstein is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University with a specialty in eighteenth-century art and visual culture. Her dissertation, “Carmontelle’s Facebook: Portraiture, Persona, and Permeability in Eighteenth-Century France,” examines hundreds of portraits on paper produced by Louis Carrogis called Carmontelle (1717-1806), a French amateur draftsman. Margot received her B.A. in art history and history from Williams College in 2010. She taught English for the French Ministry of Education in Paris during the 2010-2011 academic year. In 2012, she earned her M.A. in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she studied eighteenth-century French and British drawings. She also holds an M.A. and an M.Phil. in art history from Columbia University. Margot has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the Morgan Library & Museum, the New-York Historical Society, the Calder Foundation, and the Williams College Museum of Art.

Kit Brooks is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of the History of Art and Archaeology at Harvard University, specializing in Japanese art history of the Edo period (1603–1868). Their dissertation, “Something Rubbed: Medium, Texture, and History in Japanese Surimono,” examines the position of privately published surimono prints in the broader picture of nineteenth-century Japanese print history and its contemporary awarenesses. Kit has held positions in several museums, including the British Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Boston Children’s Museum. As an intern at the Harvard Art Museum, Kit planned the inaugural rotations for the new Japanese galleries at the reopened Fogg Museum. Kit also curated the exhibition “Uncanny Japan: The Art of Yoshitoshi,” at the Worcester Art Museum (Spring 2015). Kit is currently working on an exhibition of Japanese drawings in collaboration with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. 

J.V. Decemvirale is a doctoral student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A. in Art History from New York University and his M.A. in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London. His dissertation, “Knowing Your Place And Making Do: Popular Arts Organizing in Black and Latino Los Angeles, 1960 to Present,” focuses on the methods and tactics of community-based cultural organizing and popular arts activism in Los Angeles. He has interned and worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. J.V. has also worked as a project coordinator for several large symposia, the most recent being “Complementary Modernisms in China and the United States: Art as Life/Art as Idea,” where he also presented a paper on his recent research on black arts activism in Los Angeles. 

Lee Hallman is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, specializing in twentieth-century art. Her dissertation investigates the complex renewals of the landscape tradition in the postwar London paintings of British artists Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Lee also maintains active research interests in the history of drawings and connections between visual art and music. She received her B.A. from Vanderbilt University, a Postgraduate Diploma from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. She has assisted with exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and was the 2012-13 CUNY/Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her writings and reviews have appeared inThe Burlington Magazine,Tate Papers, andApollo, and in 2014 she contributed a catalogue essay to an exhibition at the LWL Museum of Art and Culture, Münster, Germany.

Uchenna Itam is a Ph.D candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in modern and contemporary art of the African diaspora, focusing on embodiment-based practices in photography, video, and installation art. Her dissertation considers site-specific installations created in the United States from the early 1990s to the present that affect the senses of touch, smell, taste, and hearing while engaging with the politics of race, gender, and nationality. Uchenna is a founding member of the curatorial collective INGZ, which collaborates on projects that foster new ways of engaging the visual and political. She has previously held positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Phillips Collection; The Smart Museum of Art; and The Pace Gallery. Uchenna earned an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Alexander Kauffman is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of art with a graduate certificate in cinema studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the history of modern art and media. He is currently completing a dissertation on the relationship between visual art and film in the work of Marcel Duchamp. Alex holds a B.A. summa cum laude from New York University and an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He was the Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2013-2014 and curator of the film program for the museum’s exhibition “Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp.” Recipient of the 2014 Herskovic Prize for an essay based on his master’s research, Alex is also a contributor to the catalogues of several recent exhibitions, including “Marcel Duchamp - La peinture, même. 1910-1923” at the Centre Pompidou.

Rozemarijn Landsman, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Columbia University, specializes in the Dutch seventeenth century. Her dissertation explores the work of Jan van der Heyden (1637–1712) in the realms of art, technology, and urban development. She is a recipient of a 2016-2017 Theodore Rousseau Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Previously, she was the Joseph F. McCrindle Curatorial Intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and she has held graduate internships at various other institutions, including the Amsterdam Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Prior to coming to New York she received her B.A. and M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Amsterdam, followed by an M.A., funded by the Huygens Scholarship Programme, from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. 

Shana Lopes is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University, focusing on the history of photography. Before pursuing graduate studies in the history of art, she worked for several years in photography studios in San Francisco. She then earned an M.A. in Art History at the University of Arizona, where her thesis examined photography and the writing of history. Her current research explores the transatlantic exchange between nineteenth-century American and German photographic circles. She has worked on curatorial projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the past five years, she has been an intern and research assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is presently conducting research for her dissertation in the Museum’s Department of Photographs as the Jane and Whitney Morgan Fellow.

Julie McGinnis Flanagan is a Ph. D. candidate in Art History at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She specializes in American and modern art with a deep interest in the history of collecting and display. Her current research centers on the creation of a global, democratic modernism in American art between the two World Wars as espoused by the Grand Central Art Galleries of New York. Julie received her bachelor’s degree in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University, with certificates in French Language and Literature and American Studies, and her M.A. in Art History from the University of Delaware. She has worked in the curatorial and education departments at several museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Frick Collection, and the New-York Historical Society.

Kayleigh Perkov is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in American art, viewed through the lens of craft and the decorative arts. Her dissertation, “Giving Form to Feedback: Craft and Technological Systems circa 1968-1974,” historicizes current movements in personal fabrication by examining objects that synthesize handmaking and emergent technology. Her dissertation is supported by a grant from The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design. She was a graduate intern of contemporary decorative arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and she is the 2016-2017 William H. Truettner Predoctoral Fellow at The Smithsonian American Art Museum. Kayleigh has an additional interest in the digital humanities, and was the 2015 graduate intern at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) where she assisted with the Center’s digital projects. She will be the 2016-17 graduate intern of Digital Art History/Web and New Media Development at the Getty Research Institute.