CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

Paulina Ascencio Fuentes is a researcher and curator, and an Anthropology Ph.D. candidate at New York University. She has a background in Philosophy and Social Sciences and holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from CCS, Bard College, New York. Between 2021- 2022 she was a Hevey-Filling Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Since 2023, she has collaborated with ENRICH (Equity for Indigenous Research and Innovation Coordinating Hub) and Local Contexts, two global initiatives that support Indigenous communities with tools that attribute cultural authority of heritage and data. 

Her research outlines transdisciplinary modes of knowledge production and transmission, analyzes cultural exchanges between Mexico and the United States, and approaches museums, archives, and collections as contact zones. She is a fellow of Consejo Nacional de Humanidades Ciencias y Tecnologías (CONAHCYT México) and between 2019- 2021 she was awarded the Jumex Foundation Grant to study abroad. In 2021 she was awarded the Ramapo Curatorial Prize to extend her MA thesis research with the curatorial project “Notes on Anarchaeology,” presented in Fall 2023. She is 1/4 of the curatorial collective The Department of Love. She lives and works between Guadalajara and New York City. 

Charmaine Branch is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. She studies modern and contemporary art of the Black Diaspora, with interests in printmaking, community-oriented pedagogy, and Black feminism. Her dissertation considers Black women artists’ contributions to Black intellectual histories of collecting and archiving in the United States. Branch’s research has been supported by the Joshua C. Taylor Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Billops-Hatch Fellowship at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and the Princeton University Effron Center for the Study of America.  

Before beginning her PhD, Branch worked as a Curatorial Fellow at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art. She has held various positions at other art institutions, including the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Wallach Art Gallery, Dia:Beacon, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Branch received an M.A. in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University and a B.A. in Art History from Vassar College. This fall, she will be a Tyson Scholar of American Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art. 

Shiro Burnette is a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, specializing in Egyptian, Meroitic, Roman, and Greek religious art and architecture. His research incorporates anthropological and ecocritical approaches to the study of sacred landscapes throughout the Nile Valley. Addressing the end of the 1st millennium BCE, his work challenges pervasive practices of solely reading this landscape through Hellenistic and Roman vantage points and thus centers African epistemologies in its practice. Shiro completed his undergraduate studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, earning a BA in Anthropology. 

He continued his education by obtaining an MA in Museology at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he researched the role of decolonization in exhibition design. As an art historian and archaeologist, he has participated in projects covering sites in the southern United States, Sudan, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Selinunte, and Rome. He has also held positions in collections management and curation assistance at various institutions, including the Burke Museum in Seattle, and has received funding support from the Antonina S. Ranieri International Scholars Fund. 

Alexandra Dennett is a PhD candidate at Harvard University specializing in modern art and the history of photography. Her dissertation explores photography and the politics of representation in Uzbekistan, from Russian colonization through the Soviet period. Foregrounding agency on both sides of the camera, the project reconstructs how photographs participated in political life and shaped ideas about Central Asian identity in the twentieth century. 

Alexandra is currently a Leonard A. Lauder Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research has also been supported by the American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar Program, the Stephen F. Cohen-Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. After receiving her BA in the History of Art from Yale, where she was introduced to museum work through positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, she then studied at the European University at Saint Petersburg, in Russia. Before beginning her PhD studies, she worked as an archivist and researcher at The Irving Penn Foundation in New York, contributing to the touring “Irving Penn: Centennial” exhibition and other projects. 

Rachel Hunter Himes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University. Her research emphasizes the decorative arts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France as a site for the development and maintenance of racial ideology, with particular attention to stability and shifts in decorative motifs across slavery and its abolitions. Her research has been supported by The Huntington Library and Museum, the Decorative Art Trust, the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, and Columbia’s Office of the Provost. Rachel is a graduate of the Brown University-Rhode Island School of Design Dual Degree Program. 

As a museum educator, Rachel has worked at the Cleveland Museum of Art and The Frick Collection, in addition to providing curatorial assistance to the exhibition Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 2022 through May 2023. Her writing has appeared in “Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered” (Yale University Press, 2022), n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Architecture, and The Journal of Museum Education. 

Elif Karakaya is a PhD candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, New York, and currently a visiting student at the Center of Turkish, Ottoman, Balkanic, and Central Asian Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her dissertation, Unfinished Empire: Place and Memory in Post-Ottoman Visual Art, examines how contemporary artists of Greek, Armenian, and Arab descent—descendants of communities displaced by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire—engage with inherited memories of loss and reimagine ancestral geographies through visual media.

She is also an editorial board member of InVisible Culture, a peer-reviewed journal on visual culture run by graduate students. Previously, she studied philosophy at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne University. In addition to her academic work, she has translated several books from French into Turkish by authors such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière. Her broader research interests include memory, migration, diaspora studies, artistic intervention in archive, and Post- Ottoman studies. 

Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz is an artist, curator, poet, and PhD candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, with a specialization in modern and contemporary art from the north of Africa. Their dissertation, “Indigenous Presentness: Translocal Politics of Amazigh Art and Resistance,” explores the nexus between Amazigh artistic production and sovereignty movements across the Indigenous territories known as Tamazgha, connecting recent revival movements to larger discourses on indigeneity and Africanity. Khaymaz is the 2023 recipient of the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, awarded by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) for their paper titled “To Twist a Historical Knot: Projects of Pan-Arabism, Hurufiyya, and Amazighism.” In 2022, they were awarded the Mark Tessler Graduate Student Prize Award by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) for the paper titled “Phantom Images, Residual Violences: An Unlooking and Untelling of Marc Garanger’s Femmes algériennes 1960.” Between 2023 and 2024, Khaymaz held curatorial fellowships at Tate Modern, London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

Maysa Martins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the modern and contemporary art of the Black Atlantic. It centers on the production of self-taught artists, vernacular aesthetic strategies, and the role of Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual traditions within artistic and political modernities in Brazil, Jamaica, and Angola. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Black Prophets: The Material and Spiritual Archives of the Black Atlantic in the works of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Lee Scratch Perry, and Paulo Kapela” considers how the artists’ plethora of sacred and ordinary objects offer insights into the Atlantic’s micro and macro histories from the perspective of modernity’s outliers. 

Martins is the 2024-26 curatorial fellow at the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin, the former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum (2023-2024), and former educator at Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel de Araújo. She received her M.A. in Art History from UNIFESP (São Paulo, Brazil, 2021) and her BA in Visual Arts from UNESP (São Paulo, Brazil, 2015). 

Earnestine Qiu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is writing a dissertation on depictions of imperial power and space in the Byzantine and Armenian Alexander Romance manuscripts produced after the first fall of Constantinople. Earnestine has interned at the International Center of Medieval Art and has held positions in curatorial departments at the Morgan Library and Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

She holds a B.A. in linguistics and art history from Rutgers University and an M.A. in art history from Tufts University. Her research has been supported by the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Armenian General Benevolent Union. 

Ashley K. Raghubir is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. She researches late twentieth and twenty-first-century art of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Her dissertation considers questions of material and medium in relation to histories of empire, colonialism, and migration. She has held curatorial Research Assistant positions in support of exhibition projects at The Goldfarb Gallery at York University and the Gardiner Museum (both in Toronto, Canada). She aspires to curate exhibitions of contemporary Caribbean art in the region as well as across the diaspora in collaboration with others. Ashley is committed to curatorial projects that are deeply invested in public programming and community. 

In 2024, she was a visiting student at the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity, and Nation at the University of the Arts London’s (UAL) Chelsea College of Arts (London, United Kingdom). Her art writing has been published in The Journal of Modern Craft, C Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, and O BOD. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Art History (Specialist) from the University of Toronto and a Master of Arts in Art History from Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). 

Ana María Sánchez Lesmes is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. Her dissertation explores the professionalization of curatorial practice in Colombia during the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of South–South collaborations, focusing on the partnership between Colombian curator Eduardo Serrano and Australian curator John Stringer. Her research contributes to a growing historiography of curatorial networks in Latin America and the Global South that challenge dominant Euro–U.S. narratives of curatorial history.

Ana María is also a professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where she teaches in the Master’s Program in Museology and Heritage Management. A Fulbright– MinCiencias Scholar (2021 cohort), she has held fellowships from the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. In Colombia, she has worked with institutions such as the Instituto Distrital de Patrimonio Cultural (IDPC), the Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, and the Museo Nacional de Colombia, developing curatorial, educational, and heritage management projects. Her broader research interests include curatorial historiography, South–South curatorial networks, decolonial museology, exhibition histories, and modern and contemporary Latin American art. 

Chahrazad Zahi is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Her research examines Moroccan art in the 1980s and 1990s—a period marked by political repression and the decline of post-independence cultural infrastructure. She focuses on artists who, working with limited institutional support, turned to installation, ephemeral media, and vernacular forms to navigate censorship and social fragmentation. Through archival research, oral histories, and visual analysis, her work reframes this era not as a lull between postcolonial modernism and the contemporary, but as a generative site of experimentation, ultimately unsettling the epistemologies inherited from the 1960s and redefining modernism beyond the confines of regional schools or nationalist frameworks. 

Chahrazad’s curatorial and editorial practice bridges Morocco and the international art world. Her writing appears in Something We Africans Got, Art Basel, and in edited volumes, monographs, and catalogues dedicated to North African artists and histories. She previously served as Head of Arts at the British Council in Rabat and has held research fellowships at Sotheby’s London and the Musée Delacroix (Musée du Louvre). Based between Marrakech and Boston, Chahrazad continues to lead curatorial workshops focused on decolonial methodologies and experimental pedagogy.