CCL Fellowship Participants

Dennis Carr is the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Previously, he was the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture in Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2010, he was a co-curator of the MFA’s 53-gallery Art of the Americas Wing, which reoriented American art with a hemispheric focus, and he has led efforts within the department to expand the collections of American, Latin American, Ancient American, and Native American art. His recent exhibitions include Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia (2015), Collecting Stories: Native American Art (2018), and Cecilia Vicuña: Quipu Desaparecido (2018), and he contributed to Art and Industry in Early America (2016), which won the Charles F. Montgomery Book Prize. He holds graduate degrees from Yale University in the History of Art and from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. Prior to joining the MFA in 2007, Carr served in the departments of American Paintings and Sculpture and American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. Carr is currently at work on Royal Houses of the Eagle: Aztec and Habsburg Empires, which explores the notion of collecting from a cross-cultural perspective in the sixteenth century.

Ryan N. Dennis currently serves as the as the Senior Curator and Director of Public Initiatives at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Previousely, she was the Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange (CAPE) at the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA). Most recently, Dennis co-curated, with Jessica Bell Brown, the critically acclaimed exhibition, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, currently on view at Brooklyn Museum and traveling nationwide through 2024. Her recent projects include Leonardo Drew’s City in the Garden (2020), Betye Saar: Call & Response (2021), Dusti Bonge: Piercing the Inner Wall (2021) and organizing CAPE artist-in-residence Shani Peter’s Collective Care for Black Mothers and Caretakers (2022) with the local Jackson community. Before joining MMA, she served as the Curator and Programs Director at Project Row Houses (PRH) in Houston, where she worked with over 100 BIPOC artists to exhibit their work in PRH’s shotgun houses. She led the creation of the 2:2:2 Exchange Residency Program with the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and established Project/Site, a temporary, site-specific, commission-based public art program. In 2017, she launched the PRH Fellowship with the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the University of Houston’s Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts. Dennis earned her Master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute, focusing on Curatorial Practice. Her writings have appeared in online and print catalogs, journals, and international publications. She has been a visiting lecturer and critic at numerous art schools and institutions and has taught courses on community-based practices and contemporary art at the University of Houston. Dennis was a Class of 2019 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a program that offers leadership training to art museum curators. Recently she was the co-curator of the 2021 Texas Biennial, A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon (2021), and the guest art editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.

Thomas Andrew Denenberg is the director of Shelburne Museum.  Prior to moving to Vermont in 2011, he served as the chief curator and deputy director of the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine), curator of American art at Reynolda House (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), and curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, Connecticut).  Tom received a B.A. in history from Bates College and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University.  He has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and Winterthur and taught at Boston University, Harvard, and Wake Forest.  He is the author of Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (Yale University Press, 2003), Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place (Portland Museum of art, 2010), and he edited and/or contributed to Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (Smithsonian Institution, 1999), Backstage Pass: Rock and Roll Photography (Yale University Press, 2008), Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England (Yale University Press, 2009), Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine (Yale University Press, 2012), Wyeth Vertigo (University Press of New England, 2013), and Painting a Nation: American Art at Shelburne Museum (Rizzoli, 2017).    

Deborah Cullen, PhD, is Executive Director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts, a contemporary art museum that connects diverse audiences to the urban experience through its permanent collection, special exhibitions, and education programs that strive to reflect the borough's dynamic communities. 

From 2012 to 2018, Cullen served as Director & Chief Curator of The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in the City of New York, where she oversaw its expansion into the new Lenfest Center for the Arts in Harlem, and initiated the Uptown Triennial. The last project she oversaw, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, traveled to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 

Previously, Cullen was Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio, New York, where she worked from 1997 to 2012. Cullen’s projects there included participating in the curatorial team and co-editing the anthology for Caribbean: Crossroads of the World (2012); and curating Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer (2010, and his 2012 monograph for UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center); Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (2009); and Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000 (2008), for which she received a 2006 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. 

Cullen has had a long affiliation with the late Jamaican-American master printmaker, Robert Blackburn (1920-2003), and his Printmaking Workshop; her dissertation for CUNY Graduate Center focused on his work. She is curating Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, debuting at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2020. In 2014, Cullen curated Robert Blackburn: Passages for the David C. Driskell Center at University of Maryland, College Park. She also curated Interruption: The 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2013), and was chief curator of The Hive: The Third Poligraphic Trienal of San Juan (Puerto Rico, 2012). 

Andria Derstine was named John G. W. Cowles Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) at Oberlin College in 2012; she previously held curatorial positions there and at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has curated numerous exhibitions of Renaissance through contemporary art, several in conjunction with such institutions as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her scholarly expertise is in 17th-18th century French and Italian art; her dissertation, from NYU, was on the French Academy in Rome and the Accademia di San Luca during the period 1660-1740. Among her numerous publications are the catalogues Allen Memorial Art Museum: Highlights from the Collection (2011) and Masters of Italian Baroque Painting: The Detroit Institute of Arts (2005), as well as essays and articles on Venetian 18th-century art, Nattier, and Monet.

Janet Dees is the Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Art History and an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. Trained as a historian of American art, her curatorial work focuses on the ways in which contemporary artists engage with history and archives; artists’ interest in transformational practices; and inclusive museum methodologies. Her work includes commitments to African American, African diasporan, and Indigenous artists. Prior to her appointment at the Block, Dees was curator at SITE Santa Fe, where she worked since 2008. In addition, her experience includes positions at the New York African Burial Ground Project, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Paul R. Jones Collection at the University of Delaware. She earned a B.A. from Fordham University in Art History & African American Studies, and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Delaware. Dees is the recipient of a 2018 Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for the development of A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence (2022).

Daisy Desrosiers is the Director and Chief Curator of Gund Gallery at Kenyon College. She was previously the inaugural Director of Artist Programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art. In 2021, she was one of the co-curators of the first MOCA Toronto Triennale, GTA21 as well as being a contributor to the NEW MUSEUM Triennale (2021) catalog as well as As we Rise (Aperture, 2021). She is currently working on a monographic publication with the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) on the work of the artist, Tau Lewis to be published in 2022.

She was the inaugural Nicholas Fox Weber Curatorial Fellow with the Glucksman Museum in Cork, Ireland in 2018 while also a curatorial fellow at Art in General in Brooklyn later that same year. Interdisciplinary art historian and curator, her recent research is concerned with the politics of translation as a productive site of connections and language making. Her thesis investigated the cultural and post-colonial role of commodities in contemporary practices such as the usage of sugar.

Since the conclusion of the CCL program in May 2014, Aimee Marcereau DeGalan has assumed a greater leadership role at the Dayton Art Institute with complete oversight of the curatorial division. She is in the process of adding several new positions to the curatorial team and working with education staff to develop an interpretive plan for the permanent collections. Within her own department, she is actively developing a collections management strategy. A member of the leadership committee of the museum, and regular board meeting attendee, she is engaged in strategic discussions at both the board and executive committee level. Balancing administration with curatorial responsibilities, Aimee maintains an ambitious exhibition cycle and recently curated the second highest attended exhibition at the museum in the last five years. Her on-going and forthcoming research projects include work on Sebastiano Ricci, Joshua Reynolds, Mary Linwood and Grandma Moses, and Op Art in Ohio; for many of which she is writing grants to help realize.

Alison de Lima Greene is curator of Contemporary Art & Special Projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Before coming to Texas, Ms. Greene worked in the department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and lectured at The Cooper Union. She graduated cum laude from Vassar College in 1974 and received her Master’s degree from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1981.  Among her recent exhibitions are Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski and James Turrell: The Light Inside. A 2010 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, Ms. Greene also serves as a trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators and on the board of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Art.

Laura De Becker is the Chief Curator and the Helmut and Candis Stern Curator of African Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). A specialist in Central African art, she joined UMMA after a Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her most recent projects include We Write To You About Africa, a reinstallation of UMMA’s permanent African collection that has doubled the footprint of the African gallery, and that prompted a separate project grappling with issues of ownership and ethics, titled Wish You Were Here: African Art and Restitution.

De Becker earned her PhD from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom, and has worked at museums in Rwanda, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Belgium and the United States. She is currently working on a project titled Ghana 1957: African Art After Independence, scheduled to commemorate Ghana’s 70th anniversary of its Independence in 2027.