CCL Fellowship Participants

Mark A. Castro has been the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Chrysler Museum of Art since April 2023. Prior to coming to Norfolk, he was the inaugural Jorge Baldor Curator of Latin American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), where he curated Flores Mexicanas: Women in Modern Mexican Art (2019), Frida Kahlo: Five Works(2021), Devoted: Art and Spirituality in Mexico and New Mexico (2021), Octavio Medellín: Spirit and Form (2022), and Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction (2023). Prior to Dallas, he held various positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where he was involved in numerous exhibitions, including co-curating the internationally acclaimed Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950 (2016).

Castro’s research touches on various regions of Latin America, but his primary focus is on the arts of Mexico, from the colonial era through the twentieth century. Castro holds a B.A. in Archaeology and Studio Art from Hamilton College, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in art history from Bryn Mawr College.

Connie H. Choi is the Associate Curator, Permanent Collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem. She organized the 2019–21 traveling exhibition Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem—the catalogue for which received the 2020 Henry Allen Moe Prize—and Their Own Harlems (2017), and co-organized Fictions (2017–18) and Regarding the Figure (2017). Prior to joining the Studio Museum in 2017, Choi was the Assistant Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she served as the lead curator of the 2016 reinstallation of the American galleries. She has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs, and serves on the advisory committees of the Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation and the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. Choi has a PhD in art history from Columbia University, an EdM in arts education from Harvard University, and a BA in history of art from Yale University.

Ruth Erickson is the Mannion Family Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where she has curated solo exhibitions with artists Kevin Beasley, Mark Dion, Wangechi Mutu, Tschabalala Self, and Vivian Suter, as well as traveling group exhibitions on Black Mountain College and another on contemporary art and migration. Her forthcoming projects include a group exhibition titled “A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now” that registers the current wave of portraiture among artists of her generation as well as “To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood” an international and intergenerational survey of artists who have derived inspiration from childhood. At the ICA/Boston, she oversees the permanent collection and had led a comprehensive review of acquisitions through the lens of diversity and equity. She has edited and contributed to multiple exhibition catalogues, including Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, and presented and published her work widely, in venues from Jeu de Paume, Paris, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, to Art in America and Framework. She received a BA in Art History from Carleton College and an MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, and regularly serves as a visiting critic, most recently at Maine College of Art and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Ruba Katrib is Curator at MoMA PS1 in New York. At MoMA PS1 she has curated exhibitions such as Greater New York (2021), Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life (2021), Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991 - 2011 (2019) (co-curated with Peter Eleey), the retrospective of Simone Fattal in 2019, and the solo shows of Edgar Heap of Birds (2019), Karrabing Collective (2019), Fernando Palma Rodríguez, and Julia Phillips (2018). From 2012 - 2018 she was Curator at SculptureCenter in New York where she curated over twenty solo and group exhibitions including 74 million million million tons (2018) (co-curated with artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan) and A Disagreeable Object(2012); and solo shows of the work of Carissa Rodriguez (2018), Kelly Akashi, Teresa Burga, Nicola L., Charlotte Prodger (all 2017), Aki Sasamoto, Cosima von Bonin (all 2016), Anthea Hamilton, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Erika Verzutti (all 2015), and Jumana Manna (both 2014). Previously, Katrib was the Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami from 2007 – 2012 where she organized several solo and group exhibitions. Katrib co-curated SITE Santa Fe’s 2018 biennial, Casa Tomada, along with José Luis Blondet and Candice Hopkins.

Jamilee Lacy is the Executive Director of Frye Art Museum in Seattle. She was previously the inaugural Director and Chief Curator of Providence College Galleries [PCG], where she oversaw a contemporary art program and co-founded two cooperative organizations: My HomeCourt, an annual program that curates public artworks into urban parks, and Interlace Grant Fund, a regranting initiative co-administered with Dirt Palace. In 2021, Lacy received a curatorial research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in support of her forthcoming exhibition Digital River, Burning Mountain: Shanshui Art Now. In 2022, she was commissioning curator of The Trustees of Reservations’ Art & Landscape program, which includes the organization of “Counterculture,” a public artwork by Rose B. Simpson that travels to museums across the country through 2025. Lacy previously worked in curatorial roles at Northwestern University, Evanston; Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague.

Miranda Lash is the Ellen Bruss Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Lash has organized a wide range of museum exhibitions including Jason Moran: Bathing the Room with Blues; Keltie Ferris: *O*P*E*N*; BRUCE CONNER: FOREVER AND EVER (co-curated with Dean Otto); the traveling retrospective Mel Chin: Rematch; Camille Henrot: Cities of Ys; Rashaad Newsome: King of Arms; and Swoon: Thalassa. In 2016 Lash and Trevor Schoonmaker co-organized the acclaimed exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art. From 2008 to 2014 Lash was the founding curator of modern and contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her upcoming project Eamon Ore-Giron: Competing with Lighting/ Rivalizando con el relampágo will present the artist’s first major museum survey and monograph.

Lash currently serves as Vice President on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has been a Clark Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and a member of the artistic director’s council for the international triennial Prospect New Orleans. She holds a BA with honors from Harvard University in the History of Art and Architecture and an MA from Williams College.

Alexis Lowry is curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York, where she is responsible for exhibitions, commissions, and public programs across Dia’s sites and locations. Lowry also oversees acquisitions and the permanent collection. At Dia Chelsea, she has curated new projects by Lucy Raven, Rita McBride, and Kishio Suga. At Dia Beacon, she organized the first North American retrospective of Charlotte Posenenske’s work, as well as installations by Mel Bochner, Mary Corse, Charles Gaines, Barry Le Va, Lee Ufan, Robert Morris, Michelle Stuart, and Anne Truitt. Prior to joining Dia, she was curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, and a freelance project manager for Creative Time, New York. She has recently contributed to publications for Art Monthly, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Orlando, The Drawing Center, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in addition to books produced by Dia. In 2021, Lowry was the first invited curator-in-residence at the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany. She is on the board of directors for the Triple Aught Foundation and serves on the advisory council of The Great Northern, Minneapolis. She received her PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2019.

Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. At the MFA, she is working on her next project, “Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit.” As part of an independent team, she is working on “Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births.” The recipient of an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, she received an M.Phil from and is currently completing her doctorate in art history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Previously, she was the The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where she co-organized “Designs for Different Futures.” From 2014-2018 she was a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized “Design and Violence” and “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” In 2011, she co-founded ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org, a Kress Foundation-funded project now used in over 185 countries. In 2019, she co-founded Art + Museum Transparency, home to the Salary Transparency Spreadsheet.

Aimee Ng is Curator at The Frick Collection in New York. A specialist in Italian Renaissance art, she has organized exhibitions on painting, sculpture, and drawings of the period including shows on Bertoldo; Moroni; Andrea del Sarto; Parmigianino; and European portrait medals from the fifteenth to nineteenth century. In 2020, she co-curated Frick Madison, the critically-acclaimed installation of the Frick’s historic collection in the Breuer building on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, where she recently co-organized a year-long project called “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” featuring the work of Salman Toor, Doron Langberg, Jenna Gribbon, and Toyin Ojih Odutola alongside paintings by Vermeer, Holbein, and Rembrandt. She has co-created and featured in Frick video series including the Webby Award-honored “Cocktails with a Curator” as well as “What’s Her Story?” and “Where in the World?” Her most recent publication, on Constable’s “The White Horse,” is co-authored with William Kentridge. She has held curatorial and academic positions at The Morgan Library & Museum, where she was postdoctoral fellow at the Morgan’s Drawing Institute in 2014, and at Columbia University, where she earned her Ph.D.

Since 2021, E. Carmen Ramos is chief curatorial and conservation officer at The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. There she leads the curatorial and conservation teams as they serve the nation and beyond through collections development, ground-breaking scholarship, art conservation, and scientific research. Ramos previously served as the acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), where she built one of the largest collections of Latinx art at a museum of U.S. art. She organized exhibitions including ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now (2020), Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (2013) and Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography(2017), the latter two which received Awards for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. In addition to her numerous catalogues, her scholarship appears in American Art, and in books like Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture and Identity on the Island. Before becoming a curator, she worked on early DEAI initiatives at The Brooklyn Museum.

Ramos holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in art history from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in art history from New York University.

Tamara H. Schenkenberg is curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. Since joining the Pulitzer in 2012, she has organized a wide range of exhibitions, including Zarina: Atlas of Her World; Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work; Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form (co-curated with Sharon Hecker); Fred Sandback: 64 Three-Part Pieces; and most recently a retrospective of the artist Hannah Wilke. Her primary focus is on modern and contemporary art, with research interests in identity and displacement, as well feminist practices. Before arriving at the Pulitzer, Schenkenberg held a graduate curatorial fellowship and curatorial assistant positions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where she worked on exhibitions of postwar German art. A native of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Schenkenberg was a Fulbright scholar at the Free University of Berlin and earned her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Vanessa D. Thaxton-Ward is Director of the Hampton University Museum.  Previously, she was Director of the York Bailey Museum, at Penn Center on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.

As Director, she has secured funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Save America’s Treasures, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Luce Foundation, Art Bridges Foundation, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the Chrysler Museum of Art.  She is publisher of the International Review of African American Art, has curated exhibitions with various artists from Hampton’s collection like Margo Humphrey, Elizabeth Catlett, John Biggers, and has served as organizer and curator of the biennial National Juried Exhibition: New Power Generation, for emerging artists of African descent.  In 2018, Thaxton-Ward and the museum hosted the Association of African American Museum’s 40th Conference.

Thaxton-Ward is on the board of Arts for Learning and previously served on the Virginia Association of Museums board and the Commission on African American History Education in the Commonwealth, appointed by Governor Ralph Northam.

She received her Ph.D. in American Studies, concentrating in African American Material Culture, from the College of William and Mary and Master of Arts in Museum and Archival Studies from Hampton University.