CCL Fellowship Participants

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.

Kathleen Forde is a curator based in NYC and Istanbul. Forde is the Artistic Director at Large for Borusan Contemporary, a collection-based space for media arts exhibitions, commissions and public programming in Istanbul. During her tenure at BC Forde has curated and toured numerous solo exhibitions by artists such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Daniel Canogar, Brigitte Kowanz and John Gerrard, and collaborated with curators and institutions that include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Espacio Telefonica Madrid, La Boral Gijon and the Kunsthalle Darmstadt.

Concurrently she is working as an independent curator with various institutions both nationally and abroad.

From 2005 to 2012 Forde was the Curator of Time-Based Visual Arts at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY. At EMPAC she commissioned and/or produced a broad range of new work by artists that included The Wooster Group, Laurie Anderson, Japanther, Jem Cohen and Ben Rubin, and curated exhibitions such as Dancing on the Ceiling: Art and Zero Gravity.

Prior to EMPAC, Forde was the Curatorial Director for Live Arts and New Media at the Goethe Institut Internaciones in Berlin and Munich. As Curatorial Associate and then Assistant Curator for Media Arts at SFMOMA (1999–2002), she co-curated the interdisciplinary show 010101: Art in Technological Times in addition to ongoing work with both temporary and permanent collection exhibitions.

She has also written and/or curated on a freelance basis for various organizations that have included the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology; The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA); Independent Curators International; The Transmediale Festival, Berlin; Kunstverein Dusseldorf and Cologne; VideoZone, Tel Aviv; the Rotterdam Film Festival; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She sits on the board of Issue Project Room, NY, and on the Advisory Committees for the SETI Institute Artist in Residence Program and the Moving Image Art Fair, Istanbul.

In 2002-3 Forde held an Alexander von Humboldt research scholarship in Berlin She earned an MA in Post-1945 Art and Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a BA in Communications and Art History from the Loyola College of Maryland.

Frederick Ilchman holds a BA in art history from Princeton and received his PhD from Columbia University, with a dissertation on Jacopo Tintoretto's early career. Supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the Metropolitan Museum and Save Venice Inc., he spent five years in Venice studying Venetian Renaissance painting.

Frederick came to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2001 as assistant curator of paintings, with responsibility for Italian medieval and Renaissance paintings.  Soon after arrriving at the MFA, he was the Boston curator for Thomas Gainsborough, 1727-1788 (2003).  He helped plan the major exhibition on Jacopo Tintoretto at the Museo del Prado in the spring of 2007 and was a contributor to its catalogue. An essay on "Tintoretto as a Painter of Religious Narrative" from the Prado's catalogue won an award from the Association of Art Museum Curators.

Later he served as the lead curator forTitian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice(2009), an exhibition organized jointly with the Musée du Louvre.  Recently, he co-curated Goya: Order and Disorder, the largest Goya exhibition in North America in a quarter century, for the MFA.

Frederick is a member of the board and the project director of Save Venice Inc., the largest private committee dedicated to preserving the cultural patrimony of Venice. He is now also the Chairman of the Boston Chapter of Save Venice. He was promoted to the Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings at the MFA in 2009, and became Chair, Art of Europe, in February 2014.

Chiyo Ishikawa works with Director Kimerly Rorschach to plan SAM’s artistic program, overseeing the Curatorial, Conservation, and Museum Services Division. Dr. Ishikawa joined SAM in 1990 after serving as an NEA curatorial intern in the Department of European Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and in the Department of Paintings Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she was also a Theodore Rousseau Fellow. She has a Ph.D. in art history from Bryn Mawr College (1989).  Her 2004 book on a work of art from the Spanish royal collection, The Retablo of Isabel la Católica by Juan de Flandes and Michel Sittow (Brepols), won the Eleanor Tufts Book Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies.

Among exhibitions Ishikawa has curated are Spain in the Age of Exploration 1492-1819; Renaissance Art in Focus: Neri di Bicci and Devotional Painting in Italy; and Leonardo Lives: The Codex Leicester and Leonardo da Vinci’s Legacy of Art and Science. She was local curator for Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris; Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise; Rembrandt, Van Dyck & Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London; and The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece, among many other shows.

Ishikawa’s 2004 book on a work of art from the Spanish royal collection, The Retablo of Isabel la Católica by Juan de Flandes and Michel Sittow (Brepols), won the Eleanor Tufts Book Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies. She was awarded the Spanish Order of Isabel la Católica in 2004 for her work on Spain in the Age of Exploration 1492-1819. She participated in the Center for Curatorial Leadership program in 2010.

Alisa LaGamma’swork has been instrumental in rethinking the history of sub-Saharan African art and culture.  In 2012 the Bard Graduate Center recognized her work with the Iris Award for Outstanding Scholarship. LaGamma’s Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures publication received the 2012 International Tribal Art Book Prize.  In 2007 the Association of Art Museum Curators recognized the publication for her exhibition Eternal Ancestors: Art of the Central African Reliquary as among the profession’s outstanding exhibition catalogues. Her 2008 exhibition The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End addressed historical continuities between classical forms of expression from sub-Saharan Africa and the work of leading contemporary artists from the region.

A 1988 graduate of the University of Virginia, LaGamma received her MA and PhD in art history from Columbia University. Her 1995 dissertation: “The Art of the Punu Mukudj Masquerade: Portrait of an Equatorial Society” was based on a year of fieldwork in southern Gabon. Born in the Congo, LaGamma has traveled widely in sub-Saharan Africa and lived in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Nigeria, Togo, and South Africa. She has taught as a visiting professor in the art history departments at Columbia University, Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University’s Institute of Fine of Fine Arts and is a member of the editorial board of the journal African Arts.  From 2009-10 she served as Chair of the Metropolitan’s Forum of Curators, Conservators, and Scientists.

Lisa Rotondo-McCord is currently the Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs/Curator of Asian Art and has served as NOMA’s Curator of Asian Art since 1994. Educated at Wesleyan University and Yale University, her graduate studies focused on twentieth-century Chinese painting. While at NOMA, she implemented thematic installations of the permanent collection of Asian art, and organized a number of traveling exhibitions including Heaven and Earth Seen Within (2000), An Enduring Vision (2002), and 5,000 Years of Chinese Art (2004). Similar forthcoming projects include The Sound of One Hand: Painting and Calligraphy by Zen Master Hakuin (2010) and The Elegant Image: Hindu, Buddhist and Jain Bronzes (2011), and the non-Asian exhibitions Living Color: Photographs by Judy Cooper (2008-10) and Beyond the Blues: Reflections on African America from the Amistad Research Center Collection (2010-12). Rotondo-McCord created the Hyogo-NOMA Art Therapy Initiative (2006-present), implemented cell phone tours at NOMA (2008-present), and continues to write and administer major grant initiatives.

Kristina Van Dyke was most recently director of Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Prior to joining the Pulitzer, she was curator for collections and research at the Menil Collection in Houston.  She has organized exhibitions on historical and contemporary African art and commissioned projects on Pacific art and Byzantine art. Van Dyke received her M.A. in Art History from Williams in 1999 and her PhD from Harvard University in 2005 where she wrote her dissertation on the concept of objects in oral cultures in Mali.

Stephan Wolohojian is Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum. He was previously Landon and Lavinia Clay Curator, and Head of the Department of Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts, at Harvard Art Museum/ Fogg Museum. He received his Ph. D. in Fine Arts from Harvard University and then assumed a teaching position at the University of Delaware, where he taught courses on Renaissance art as well as on theory. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and was recently a visiting Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies. He has a published and lectured on a wide range of topics and curated numerous exhibitions at the Fogg. He was organizing curator of “A Private Passion: 19th- Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection,” the catalogue for which was awarded the AAMC Book prize, among other awards, and was co-curator of “Degas at Harvard,” which was the most visited exhibition in the history of the Fogg Museum.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to her position at the VMFA, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston where worked from 2000 - 2017.  She has served as director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995-2000) and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988-1995).   In 2000 she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

During her tenure at the CAMH, Cassel Oliver organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009); a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us (2010); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012) and Black in the Abstract, Parts 1 & 2 (2013 and 2014). She has also mounted significant survey exhibitions for Benjamin Patterson, Donald Moffett, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero and Annabeth Rosen.   

Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and with Naomi Beckwith, marked her debut exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  The exhibition traveled from the MCA Chicago to Richmond and later to the Rose Art Museum at Brandies University.  Cassel Oliver’s most recent exhibition, Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art From the African American South opened at the VMFA in June, 2019.  The exhibition features 31 newly acquired works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta.

Cassel Oliver is the recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007); the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Award (2011); the Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Foundation-to-Life Fellowship at Hunter College (2016) and the James A. Porter Book Award from Howard University (2018). From 2016-17, she was a Senior Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

She serves on the editorial board of Callaloo Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters; the advisory for the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia as well as the Smithsonian’s National Archives. She is currently the Editor in Chief for the online artist’s reference dictionary, Benezit, a subsidiary of Oxford University Press.

Cassel Oliver holds a M.A. in art history from Howard University in Washington, D.C. and, B.S. in communications from the University of Texas at Austin.

Gloria Groom holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and graduate certificate from the Ecole du Louvre.  Her monographic Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator, was published by Yale University Press in 1993. At the Art Institute of Chicago, she has been involved as curator and author in major loan exhibitions on Gauguin, Redon, Caillebotte, Renoir, Manet, Vuillard, Bonnard, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, art dealer Ambroise Vollard and in 2012-13 Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. Since 2009 she has been leading the project for the on-line collection catalogues (OSCI) of the Art Institute’s collection of paintings and works on paper for Monet and Renor (2014),  Manet, Gauguin and Pissarro (2015).  Current exhibition and book projects include Van Gogh’s Bedrooms (Chicago only) and Gauguin: Painter and Sculptor with the Musée d’Orsay. Dr. In 2005 Groom was conferred the award of Chevalier des arts et letters and Officier in 2013. 

Maxwell K. Hearn is the Douglas Dillon Chairman of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He began working at the Metropolitan Museum in 1971, helping oversee the expansion of the Met’s collection of Chinese art as well as major additions to its exhibition spaces, including the Astor Chinese Garden Court, the Douglas Dillon Galleries, and the renovated and expanded galleries for Chinese painting and calligraphy. He has worked on more than 50 exhibitions and has authored or contributed to numerous catalogues, many of which have become essential resources for the study of Chinese Art including How to Read Chinese Paintings (2008) and Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (2013). Mike, who received his undergraduate degree in art history from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Princeton, has also taught graduate and undergraduate seminars on Chinese painting at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He has traveled extensively in Asia including Cambodia in 2013 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.

Robin Held is a creative strategist, executive leader, and cultural entrepreneur.

Held has a demonstrated record of success, strategic change, and value creation in not-for-profit arts and media education, museums, and the private sector. At the core of her accomplishments -  built into her DNA - is the joy of deep engagement with artists.

As curator of more than 100 exhibitions and performances, producing partner, advisor to funders, grant writer, and executive, she has worked directly with artists to realize ambitious work in a wide range of media, from traditional to experimental, including painting, sculpture, film, video, performance, sound art, robotics, artificial intelligence, and digital media. Most recently, she has become a consultant to a select number of artists and organizations, whose innovation, entrepreneurship, and potential positive impact on society are too big to fit easily or well in separable categories of art, science, or new technology. From this vantage she guides creators to new resources, expertise and investment.

Held has strong international networks and deep experience at the forefront of public institutions, working with artists, staff, faculty, trustees, students and community stakeholders. She has led focused teams, who together have successfully transformed organizational culture and infrastructure.

Her past institutional positions include Executive Director of Reel Girls, which educates, mentors and equips young women to create transformative media; Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Collections, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, and Associate Curator at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington.

Held has published and lectured extensively on contemporary art and performance, and has established a reputation for creating innovative and compelling exhibitions of contemporary visual art, performance, film and new media. In 2013, she was honored with the Women's Funding Alliance Leah McCullough Legacy Leadership Award; in 2009 she was a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, among other awards and recognitions.

Held earned a B.F.A., Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, University of California at Los Angeles; Ph.D., ABD, in Art History, University of Washington; and a certificate of completion, Columbia University School of Business Executive Education Program.