CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

Dr. Andrea Myers Achi specializes in late antique and Byzantine art, manuscript studies, and late Roman ceramics. She received her bachelor’s degree in ancient studies from Barnard College and her doctorate in the History of Art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Since joining the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018 as Assistant Curator, she has co-curated the exhibitions Arts and Peoples of Kharga Oasis and Crossroads: Power and Piety. Her current projects include writing on the monastic economy in medieval Egypt, exploring translations of Byzantine art and culture by local and foreign artists working in Africa from the fourth through fifteenth centuries, and curating medieval northeast African art through the lens of critical race theory. In addition to her art historical research and curatorial work, Dr. Achi is an archaeological ceramicist and has been involved with numerous excavations in Egypt and Italy.

Jamin An is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He specializes in contemporary art with additional interests in medieval and Byzantine art history. His dissertation, “Tracing the Emergence of Contemporary Curatorial Practice, 1964–1976,” examines the historical transformation of the curator through the art practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the expansion of the art market, and the conditions of the post-industrial city. Jamin holds a B.A. with High Distinction in Studio Art and Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia. He has worked at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Glenstone, and the Getty Research Institute and is currently the Yvonne & Harry Lenart Graduate Fellow in the Department of Modern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Daniella Berman is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, specializing in French art of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Her dissertation considers the unfinished—as fact and aesthetic—during the Revolutionary era in France. Ms. Berman holds a B.A. from Yale University in the History of Art and Italian Studies, and an M.A. in the History of Art from the IFA. Prior to her graduate work, she served as the Bartels Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, and worked at the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University Press, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Her M.A. thesis explored the relationship between religion and print culture in French eighteenth century; other research interests include the dialogues that exist among the arts, particularly between visual art and music, and the role of translation between media and languages. She has presented at various conferences, most recently at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and for the Mellon Research Initiative at the IFA, and has contributed to several publications. 

Emilie C. Boone is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, with interests in photography, the art of the African Diaspora, and American art. She completed a B.A. in English at Amherst College and an M.A. in Art History at Washington University in St. Louis. As a current Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Emilie is completing her dissertation on the early twentieth century studio photographs of James Van Der Zee. She has served as a Fulbright Fellow at the Notman Photographic Archives in Montreal, a Dangler Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Research Associate at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Emilie has also written for History of Photography and African Arts and has a forthcoming essay in the exhibition catalog “From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography.” 

Rachel Boyd is a Ph.D. candidate in the Art History Department at Columbia University. She earned her B.A. in the history of art and Italian literature from Yale University in 2009. She went on to study for her M.Phil. in the history of art at the University of Cambridge, where she held a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Rachel is currently at work on her dissertation; her research examines the three-generation workshop of the Della Robbia family, who invented and quickly became synonymous with a form of sculpture – tin-glazed terracotta – that even today remains instantly recognizable to art historians and non-specialists alike. While her primary field of study is Renaissance art and architecture, she maintains active research interests in nineteenth-century art and historiography and in the material culture of the ancient world. She has held internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Frick Collection, and this summer will work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to contribute research for a 2016 exhibition on the Della Robbia. In September 2015, she will take up a two-year Kress Institutional Fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy. 

Yve Chavez is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at UCLA. She received her B.A. in Art History with a minor in Native American Studies from Stanford University. Her M.A. degree is from the University of Washington where she wrote her thesis on southern California Indian basket weaving traditions. Yve’s dissertation, “Indigenous Artists and Ingenuity at the California Missions After 1769” will expand upon her master’s research and provide a Native American perspective on the art of the California missions. Yve is the president of UCLA’s American Indian Graduate Student Association and an active member of the San Gabriel Mission Museum Board. Currently, she works as a research assistant at the Getty Research Institute. She has interned at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Villa, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. 

Sara E. Cole is a PhD candidate in Ancient History at Yale University specializing in the visual and material culture of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Her research explores processes of cross-cultural exchange and hybridization in antiquity and their manifestations in the art historical and archaeological records. She is currently writing her dissertation, “Graeco-Egyptian Hybridization in Ptolemaic Egypt (ca. 323 – 30 BC): Visual Culture and Elite Identity.” Sara has served as a curatorial intern at the William King Museum in Abingdon, VA, the Frank H. McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the Ancient Art Department of the Yale University Art Gallery. While at the YUAG, she curated an installation of late antique and early medieval art, the 2014 loan exhibition “Glass of the Ancient Mediterranean” for the McClung Museum, and an upcoming exhibition of ancient glass at Yale (date and title TBD). She has excavated at several archaeological sites in Egypt and is currently a member of the Kom al-Ahmer/Kom Wasit Archaeological Project in the western Delta. 

A doctoral candidate in art history at Emory University, R. Kreiter studies the visual culture of ancient Egypt and the use of Egyptian art in the west after antiquity. Recently, Kreiter completed a 2014-15 Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Teaching Fellowship at Spelman College and coordinated an Egyptian section for the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s presentation of African Cosmos: Stellar Arts, which runs through June 2015. Other interests include appropriation and participatory culture. She lives in Chicago. 

Craig Lee focuses on the history of modern architecture and design. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware. His dissertation is an architectural history of commercial signage in twentieth-century America. A secondary area of research investigates modern architecture in South Africa. His work has been recognized with support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Getty Research Institute, Duke University, and Hagley Museum and Library, among others. Craig has completed internships at the Princeton University Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Fallingwater, Museum of Modern Art, Hood Museum of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago. He received an MA from the Bard Graduate Center and a BA from Dartmouth College. 

Sydney Skelton Simon is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Stanford University, specializing in post-World War II American art and design. Her dissertation explores the nexus of art, design, science, and corporate culture in Cold War America through the career and oeuvre of the Italian-American artist Harry Bertoia (1915-1978). Simon holds a B.A. in Art History from Yale University. As an undergraduate, she co-curated two exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery and held summer internships at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. From 2007-2011, she worked as a curatorial assistant in Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Most recently, she was the first curatorial intern for the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, writing wall text and assisting with the layout of the inaugural installation of the newest museum on campus. 

Phil Taylor is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, and the David E. Finley Fellow, 2014-2017 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His dissertation, “Raoul Ubac’s Photographic Surrealism,” positions the artist as a figure through which to develop new perspectives on the position of avant-garde photography in the 1930s, on surrealism and photography’s role within it, and on the relationship of the avant-garde to the tumultuous politics of the time. Phil is the primary author of Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (M.I.T. Press, 2013). Prior to coming to Princeton, Phil organized an exhibition of modernist photography, Of the Refrain, at Robert Mann Gallery in New York in 2008. As a critic, he is a frequent contributor to artforum.com. 

Stephanie Tung leads the interpretation and presentation of the Peabody Essex Museum’s growing photography collection, which spans the 19th century through today. A specialist in the history of photography of China, her research focuses on transnational art exchanges, global modernism, translation studies, and notions of artistic labor. Prior to joining PEM in 2018, Tung worked at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, China, as a curator and director of international affairs. She has published widely on photography and contemporary art from China. Her most recent publication, Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China (PEM, 2022), was co-authored with Karina Corrigan and serves as the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name. Tung holds a Bachelor of Art in Literature and History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University, and a Masters of Arts in Art & Archeology from Princeton University. She is completing her Ph.D. in Princeton’s Art & Archeology program with her dissertation, Pictorial China: Art Photography in the Republican Era, 1923–1929.

Emily Warner is a historian of American and Modern art, currently pursuing a doctorate in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research revolves around the history of abstract murals in the New Deal and early Cold War decades. More generally, she is interested in how and for what purposes art has been claimed as “public,” and how its various sites—from specific buildings to galleries and museums—have contributed to such an understanding. She has worked in curatorial, conservation, and education departments at several museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is currently the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department. She is a recipient of the Herskovic Prize for Graduate Work on Abstract Expressionism, and of fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Luce / ACLS Foundation. 

Elizabeth Williams recently defended her dissertation at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her thesis explored attitudes towards adornment in the medieval eastern Mediterranean and included a catalogue of precious metal jewelry held in museums in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. She worked as curatorial assistant in the Department of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum for Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages (2009), and was a fellow in the Department of Islamic Art during Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (2012), for which she co-edited the exhibition blog. Elizabeth is on the advisory board for Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, opening in 2016. She has taught at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and in the Department of Art History and the Office of the Dean at NYU. As a post-doctoral teaching fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, she coordinates a collaborative project on late antique and medieval Egyptian textiles and teaches courses at the George Washington University. 

Orin Zahra is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. Having lived in Bangladesh and the Middle East prior to relocating to New York, she received her BA from the University of Maryland and MA from American University in Washington D.C. Her dissertation focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century Impressionist practices in France, England, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. She has secondary interests in South Asian visual cultures and has published in the peer-reviewed journal Modern Art Asia. Orin has held internships at the Phillips Collection, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2014, she co-organized “Inside the Palace of Fine Arts: Cosmopolitanism at the 1904 World’s Fair” at Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Presently, she is co-chairing the committee for the forthcoming inaugural Graduate Student Art History Symposium titled “Endurance, Ephemerality: Art and the Passage of Time.”