CCL Fellowship Participants

Akili Tommasino joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art as Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2021. At The Met, he organized The Facade Commission: Nairy Baghramian, Scratching the Back (2023) and is planning forthcoming 2024 exhibitions Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt (along with Dr. Andrea Achi) and Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now. He was the 2023 Cynthia Hazen Polsky/ Metropolitan Museum of Art Visiting Curator at the American Academy in Rome. Previously, Tommasino held curatorial positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he organized the inaugural editions of The Banner Project featuring Lauren Halsey (2021) and Robert Pruitt (2019) and co-curated Frank Bowling’s Americas: New York, 1966-75(2022), and at The Museum of Modern Art where he organized Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps (2017). In 2017, he founded the Prep for Prep/ Sotheby’s Summer Art Academy to foster new generations of cultural leaders and in 2020, along with his wife, Dr. Amanda Herrera Tommasino, he launched Pana Projects, an arts and education initiative in the Caribbean. A former Fulbright Fellow at the Centre Pompidou, Tommasino is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, where he earned his MA and BA.

Michael Wellen is Senior Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, where he is in charge of  displays of the collection across the museum. He has curated the Philip Gustonretrospective (currently on view), Lubaina Himid (2021), and Takis (2019), together with Guy Brett. He is a specialist of modern and contemporary art from Latin America, and led Tate’s strategic planning, acquisitions, and display of works from Latin America and diasporas from 2016-2022.  He conceived of pivotal collection displays such as Cecilia Vicuña and Joseph Beuys, A Year in Art: 1973, and staged Ernesto Salmerón's Auras of War in Turbine Hall as well as live performances of Tunga’s work. From 2011-2016 he served as Assistant Curator of Latin American and Latino Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He holds an MA and PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.

Katherine Brinson is the Daskalopoulos Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she has worked since 2005. She curated the survey exhibitions Alex Katz: Gathering (2022-23), Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure (2021), Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away (2018), Doris Salcedo (organized by the MCA Chicago, 2015), and Christopher Wool(2013–14), and co-curated the group exhibitions Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim (2015) and The Luminous Interval: The D. Daskalopoulos Collection(Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 2011). Between 2009 and 2021, Brinson oversaw the Hugo Boss Prize for significant achievement in contemporary art, for which she organized solo presentations by Deana Lawson (2021), Simone Leigh (2019), Anicka Yi (2017), Paul Chan (2015), Danh Vo (2013), and Hans-Peter Feldmann (2011). She is closely involved in building the Guggenheim’s contemporary collection, and has contributed to numerous publications, including catalogue essays on the work of Rashid Johnson, Chris Ofili, and Ryan Gander. She holds a BA in English literature from the University of Oxford and an MA in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Lisa Ayla Çakmak is the Chair and Curator of the Arts of the Ancient Mediterranean and Byzantium at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since coming to Chicago in 2020, Çakmak has overseen the department’s first major acquisitions in five years, and she has initiated a major long-term reinstallation of the Art Institute’s Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art, in addition to serving as a mentor of the museum’s recently-formed Curatorial Mentoring Program. Prior to Chicago, Çakmak spent nearly a decade at the Saint Louis Art Museum, most recently as the Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator of Ancient Art where she was responsible for the collections of Ancient Near Eastern, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art. During her tenure in St. Louis, she initiated and realized the highly successful 2018 exhibition Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds, as well as managing the reinstallations of the museum’s galleries of Greek, and Roman art, and the Egyptian and Numismatic collections.  Since 2014, she has served as the Chair of the Museums and Exhibitions Committee of the Archaeological Institute of America. Çakmak earned her PhD from the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan and attended Princeton University. In 2017 she completed an MBA at Washington University in St. Louis.

Ainsley M. Cameron is Curator of South Asian Art, Islamic Art and Antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, where she recently directed the renovation and reinstallation of the museum’s Ancient Middle East galleries (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, opened 2021), as well as the galleries of Islamic and South Asian art (opened 2022). Cameron is Chair of the museum’s Digital Committee, and has published, delivered lectures, and organized numerous exhibitions highlighting the historic and contemporary arts of India and the Islamic world. In 2019 Cameron organized Women Breaking Boundaries, a two-part, cross-collection exhibition that examined the museum’s engagement with female-identified artists. Current projects include Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art (opened Nov. 2022) and Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior (scheduled 2025).

Cameron completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2010. She holds an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and a BA in Archaeology and History from the University of Toronto. Cameron has previously held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the British Library, and the Bata Shoe Museum.

Julie is Curator, Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She holds a PhD from the Department of History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. The title of her dissertation is Alphonso Lisk-Carew and Early Photography in Sierra Leone. Since joining the AGO in 2017, she has curated a number of significant exhibitions, including Free Black North (2017), Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires (2018), and presentations from the permanent collection such as Photography, 1920s–1940s: Women in Focus (2019–2020) and Fragments of Epic Memory (2021-22).  She has actively participated in bringing works by Black artists into the collection and most notably the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, acquired in 2019. Julie has also maintained an active presence outside the AGO. She co-curated Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2018. She is also a founding Board member of Black Artists Network in Dialogue (BAND), where she also curated many exhibitions including, Ears, Eyes, Voices: Black Canadian Photojournalists, 1970s–1990s (2017), and she is a founding member of the Black Curators Forum which launched in 2019 to advocate for and support Black curators working in Canada.

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.

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.

Maria C. Gaztambide, is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Public Art of the University of Houston System (Public Art UHS). She oversees exhibitions, commissions, acquisitions, education, and public programs. Since joining the organization in 2018, she has also led exhibitions and projects on artists including Marta Chilindrón, Dorothy Hood, Rick Lowe, Jorge Pardo, Margo Sawyer, Shahzia Sikander, Leo Villareal, and Andy Warhol. Formerly, Gaztambide was the Associate Director of the ICAA at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. At the MFAH, her work straddled administration, research, publications, and long-term exhibition projects such as Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 1955–1975; Adiós Utopía: Dreams and Deception in Cuban Art since 1950; Contingent Beauty: Contemporary Art from Latin America; Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time; and Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color. Gaztambide publishes regularly on modern and contemporary art and recent book publications include El Techo de la Ballena: Retro-Modernity in Venezuela (UF Press) and On Site: 50 Years of Public Art at the University of Houston System (SCALA), both from 2019. Originally from San Juan, she holds MA degrees in Art History and Arts Administration, as well as an interdisciplinary PhD in Latin American Studies from Tulane University.

Emily Liebert is the Curator of Contemporary Art at The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). Since joining the museum in 2017, she has curated and co-curated exhibitions by Nicole Eisenman, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Raúl de Nieves, and Laura Owens, as well as the group exhibition Picturing Motherhood Now. Liebert also co-curated the CMA’s first site-specific commission in its atrium, Ámà: The Gathering Place (2019) by Emeka Ogboh. While building the CMA’s contemporary collection, she led the reinstallation of its contemporary galleries in 2021. Before the CMA, Liebert worked at the Museum of Modern Art as Curatorial Assistant on Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (2017). Liebert curated Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves” (2013), which opened at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; it was an International Association of Art Critics Award finalist for “Best Monographic Museum Show in New York.” Previously, at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Liebert was Coordinator for Education and Public Affairs. From 2008-2011, she was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum, where she also participated in its Independent Study Program. Liebert’s art criticism has appeared in Artforum and Frieze. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Casey Riley oversees Mia’s department of Global Contemporary Art and the research, exhibition, and publication of the museum’s collection of art after 1970. Her curatorial practices are rooted in collaboration and informed by the principles of inclusion and equity. Recent projects at Mia include “Objectivity: Metaphorical and Material Lives of Photographs,” “Dayanita Singh: Pothi Khana,” “Hindsight: American Documentary Photography 1930-1950,” “Vision 2020: Jess Dugan,” “Just Kids,” and “Strong Women, Full of Love: The Photography of Meadow Muska.” In partnership with Mia colleagues and a curatorial council of fourteen artists, scholars, and knowledge sharers, she is co-organizing a survey of works by First Nations, Metis, Inuit, and Native American photographic artists, opening at Mia in October 2023.

Riley was the assistant curator at the Boston Athenaeum and consulting curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She has published widely on American art and photographic history, and has most recently co-organized, with Frank Goodyear and Lisa Hostetler, “Marcia Resnick: As It Is, Or Could Be,” the catalogue for which received the Photography Network Book Prize. An experienced educator, Riley is a graduate of Yale University, holds master’s degrees from Brown University and Middlebury College, and earned her PhD from Boston University.