CCL Fellowship Participants

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.

Daniel Finamore is the Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum where he has organized over fifteen exhibitions. A graduate of Vassar and Boston University, he received the Dissertation Award from the Society for American Archaeology for his outstanding PhD research. He has conducted archaeological field research from Sable Island to Belize, some of which contributed toward the groundbreaking exhibition and book Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea. He has served on the executive council of the International Congress of Maritime Museums and as a director of the Institute for Global Maritime Studies. He has written over 40 articles and chapters for academic and popular publications, and is the author and/or editor of seven books. His recent exhibition and book on ocean liner design was co-organized with the V&A and, in partnership with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, he is currently at work on In American Waters, an exhibition which will re-envision the role of the sea in more than 200 years of American painting.

Toby Jurovics is the Chief Curator and Holland Curator of American Western Art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Prior to joining the Joslyn, Mr. Jurovics was a curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Princeton University Art Museum. This past spring, he organized the first major retrospective on Timothy H. O’Sullivan in three decades, Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan and has organized numerous exhibitions by contemporary artists, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Barbara Bosworth, John Gossage, Emmet Gowin, and Edward Ranney. He has lectured widely on American landscape photography, and is the author of essays on Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, Emmet Gowin and the New Topographics. A dedicated champion of mid-career and emerging artists, he has endeavored to create exhibitions and programs that reach both popular and academic audiences while engaging vital contemporary issues. Mr. Jurovics holds a B.A. in art history and English from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and an M.A. in art history from the University of Delaware.

Dr. C. Griffith Mann was appointed The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Michel David-Weill Curator in Charge of the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters in September, 2013. In this role, he is responsible for the medieval collections and curatorial staff in the Met’s main building, and for directing the staff and operations of The Cloisters, the branch of the Metropolitan Museum dedicated to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. Dr. Mann received his B.A. in art history and history from Williams College, and his Ph.D. in medieval art from The Johns Hopkins University. A specialist in the arts of late medieval Italy, he has published on civic patronage, painting, and devotion in Tuscany. Prior to working at the Met, Dr. Mann served as Deputy Director and Chief Curator at The Cleveland Museum of Art (2008-2013), and the Director of the Curatorial Division and Medieval Curator at The Walters Art Museum (2002-2008).

Roxana Marcoci is The David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator at MoMA, N.Y. She holds a PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. For the past twelve years she has led the Central and Eastern European section of MoMA's global research initiative known as C-MAP. Marcoci has curated major exhibitions with award-winning publications, among them: Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear (2022); Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW (2017); Zoe Leonard: Analogue(2015); Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness (2014); The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook(2012); Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2012); Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence (2011); Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 (2011); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (2010); Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making (2007); Thomas Demand (2005). She made numerous other shows within the New Photography and Projects series. Marcoci is visiting critic in the graduate program at Yale University and is currently at work on the exhibitions An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers (2023); and LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity (2024).

Olivier Meslay is Associate director of Curatorial affairs, Senior curator for European and American Art and the Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. From 1993 to 2006, he was curator at the Painting department at the Louvre in charge of British, Spanish and American Art. From 2006 to 2009, he was chief curator for the Louvre Lens Project. From 2003-2006, he was in Charge of the Louvre-Atlanta project. He curated exhibitions on British Art: D’outre Manche, British Art in French Public Collections, 1994, Constable, selected by Lucian Freud, 2002, British art in the collections of the Académie, William Hogarth at the Louvre, 2006-2007. He published extensively on British art and France. He also published on early relationship between American art and France and organized exhibitions on the same subject as, Les artistes américains et le Louvre, Paris, musée du Louvre, 2006. The same year, he released to the public La Fayette: Database of American Art - Works by United States artists from the French Public collections. This website, updated in 2010, offers more than 3000 files. He also published in 2013 for the Louvre the  « Catalogue des peintures britanniques, américaines et espagnoles du musée du Louvre ».

Since his move to Dallas he curated exhibitions like Chagall beyond Color, Hotel Texas, An art exhibition for the President and Mrs John F. Kennedy and a 19th century european works of paper exhibition Mind’s eye.

In memoriam, 1965–2016

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Jeannine A. O’Grody was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art. She received her PhD from Case Western Reserve University; MA from Syracuse University’s Florence Fellowship Program; and BA from the College of William & Mary.

Prior to arriving in Birmingham in 2000, O’Grody worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and was a National Endowment for the Arts Curatorial Fellow at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. Her area of expertise was Italian Renaissance art.

While completing her doctorate, O’Grody lived in Italy for several years, where she researched sculptural models and Michelangelo’s creative process for her dissertation Un Semplice Modello: Michelangelo and His Three-Dimensional Preparatory Works. She subsequently published articles and catalogue entries on Michelangelo and on the Baroque sculptor, Gianlorenzo Bernini. O’Grody lectured widely in the field of Renaissance and Baroque Art, including the popular lecture: “The Art of Leonardo: The Da Vinci Code Deciphered,” which was given at numerous museums throughout the country.

O’Grody organized exhibitions such as Methods and Media: Drawings from the Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art and Old Masters to Modern Methods: Prints from the Birmingham Museum of Art. She was also the curator for the Birmingham presentation of Sacred Treasures: Early Italian Paintings from Southern Collections, The Triumph of French Painting: Masterpieces from the Museums of FRAME, and The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas. O’Grody organized Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, which featured eleven rare drawings and the Codex on the Flight of Birds.

Her areas of research interest included old master drawings, prints, the creative process, patronage, and fifteenth through eighteenth century European sculpture.

Dr. Michael R. Taylor is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Art and Education at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. A native of London, England, Taylor received Master of Arts degrees in Art History from both the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He also received his Ph.D from the Courtauld Institute, where he wrote a dissertation on the work and ideas of Marcel Duchamp. Prior to his appointment at VMFA in May 2015, Dr. Taylor served as the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1997 to 2011, as well as the head of the department of modern and contemporary art. In 2011, Taylor was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City, which prepared him for the transition from curator to museum administrator. In June of that year, Taylor was appointed Director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, a position he held until March 2015. A scholar of Dada and Surrealism, Dr. Taylor has organized a number of important exhibitions during his career, including Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne (2003); Salvador Dalí: The Centennial Retrospective (2004); Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective (2009); Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (2009); and Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris (2010). In 2010, Dr. Taylor’s exhibition catalogue, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, won both the prestigious George Wittenborn Prize and first prize for best museum permanent collection catalogue by the American Association of Art Museum Curators. Also in 2009, Taylor was co-commissioner with Carlos Basualdo for the Bruce Nauman exhibition at the American Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale. The exhibition won the Golden Lion award for best national pavilion. He is currently working on the exhibition Man Ray: The Paris Portraits, 1921-1939, which will open at VMFA in July 2021. 

Christophe Cherix is The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art.  He joined the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books as Curator in July 2007 after serving as Curator of the Cabinet des estampes in Geneva.  Cherix’s specialty is modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on printed art of the 1960s and 1970s. At MoMA, he most recently organized Jasper Johns: Regrets (with Ann Temkin), an exhibition which premiered the artist’s most recent body of work, a cohesive group of paintings, drawings and prints. In addition, he organized numerous shows at the Museum, including Print/Out (2012), an exhibition on contemporary prints, artist books, and ephemera from the early 1990s to the present, and Contemporary Art from the Collection (with Kathy Halbreich; 2010–2011), an installation of the permanent collection from the 1960s to the present. His upcoming projects comprise an exhibition of the work of Yoko Ono during the 1960s (with Klaus Biesenbach, May 2015), and a retrospective of the work of Marcel Broodthaers (Spring 2016). He has been instrumental in the Museum’s recent acquisitions of the Daled Collection, the Seth Siegelaub Collection and Archives, and the Art & Project/Depot VBVR collection, which together have transformed the Museum’s collection of Conceptual art. 

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). 

Malcolm Daniel is the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was previously the Senior Curator and former Curator in Charge of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and one of the world’s preeminent curators of 19th-century photography. A specialist in the early history of photography in France and Great Britain, Daniel has curated or co-curated some 25 exhibitions during his 23-year tenure at the Metropolitan, including The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (1994); Edgar Degas, Photographer (1998); The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855 (2003); All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860 (2004); Napoleon III and Paris (2009); Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand (2010); Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz (2011); Naked before the Camera (2012); and Julia Margaret Cameron (2013). He is the author of numerous books and articles; has served as Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts; and was a 2010 Fellow at the prestigious Center for Curatorial Leadership.

During Daniel’s nine-year leadership of the Department, the Metropolitan acquired some 20,000 photographs spanning the full history of the medium. He spearheaded the acquisition of individual masterpieces, ranging from William Henry Fox Talbot and Baron Gros to Edgar Degas and László Moholy-Nagy, as well as the renowned Gilman Paper Company Collection of 8,500 photographs from the first century of the medium, 1839 to 1939.

Daniel received his B.A. from Trinity College, Hartford, in art history and studio art in 1978; his M.A. in Modern art from Princeton University in 1987; and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1991.