CCL Fellowship Participants

A Distinguished Network

Founded in 2007, CCL has organized seventeen classes of Fellows to date, training almost 200 curators who serve museums across the world. Each year CCL selects twelve applicants representing a wide range of geographic, institutional, and art historical backgrounds.

Fellows become a unique cohort who undergo professional and personal growth together throughout the CCL experience and beyond. Our graduates add critical value to the vision and strategy of museums worldwide and form a network that fosters growth and collaboration.

 


If you are a CCL alum and would like to update your personal or professional information for CCL's internal records and/or as they appear on CCL's website, please complete the form linked here.

Margaret Adler - Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper

Margaret Adler

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Title

Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper

Institution at time of Fellowship

Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Mentor

Betsy Bradley, Mississippi Museum of Art

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Margaret (Maggie) Adler is Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas where she has organized exhibitions including Audubon’s Beasts (2015), Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art (2016), Horizon Lines (2017), Puente Nuevo with Justin Favela (2019), The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion (2020), and Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington (2020). Prior to the Amon Carter, Maggie held the Barra fellowship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Prior to her curatorial career, she served as Director of Development at the Addison Gallery of American Art during a $30 million campaign and spearheaded the communications aspects of the museum. She brings her experience having worked in most museum departments to her work as a curator, with keen attention to strategic institutional goals.

Though her scholarly research focuses on nineteenth century art, she has collaborated with leading contemporary artists on large- scale commissions, including Jenny Holzer, Pepon Osorio, Gabriel Dawe, Justin Favela, and Mark Dion. She holds a BA in classical languages and the history of art and an MA in the history of art from Williams College.

Tahnee Ahtoneharjo-Growingthunder - Curator of American Indian Collections & Textiles

Tahnee Ahtoneharjo-Growingthunder

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Oklahoma History Center

Title

Curator of American Indian Collections & Textiles

Institution at time of Fellowship

Oklahoma History Center

Mentor

Matthew Teitelbaum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Tahnee Ahtoneharjo-Growingthunder serves many roles in the arts as a museum advisor, curator, and administrator. Well versed in tribal relations and Native art, Tahnee attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (Museology), Harvard University (Museum Studies and Non-profit Business Management), and working towards completing her PhD at Swansea University “International Diplomacy through Sovereign Relations with the United States Tribal Nations and Museum Practice.”

Tahnee’s research cultivates dialogues for Native American Art where her work produces projects that encourage conversations between scholarly and non-scholarly audiences, and that present current artistic practices as a communal experience of art rather than inaccessible objects. Tahnee strives to bridge the gaps in museums by presenting new narratives from the public perspective, and through authentic representation. Her preferred research collections include twenty and twenty-first-century textile design, Plains, and Woodland cultures. Her contribution to the museum field serves institutions of the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Wassan Al-Khudhairi - Chief Curator

Wassan Al-Khudhairi

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Title

Chief Curator

Institution at time of Fellowship

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Mentor

Kate Fowle, MoMA PS1

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Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including those with Derek Fordjour, Stephanie Syjuco, Bethany Collins, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Guan Xiao, Hayv Kahraman, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and SUPERFLEX. Prior to her position at CAM, Al-Khudhairi was the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art where she organized the first large-scale exhibition of the museum’s contemporary collection, Third Space / shifting conversations about contemporary art. The exhibition’s accompanying publication received the 2019 AAMC Curatorial Award for Excellence. Al- Khudhairi was invited to be a Curator for the 6th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan in 2017 and Co-Artistic Director for 9th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea in 2012. Serving as the Founding Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, Al-Khudhairi oversaw the opening of the Museum in 2010 and co- curated the first presentation of the museum’s collection Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art and curated Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab. She holds a BA in Art History from Georgia State University and an MA with Distinction from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Adrienne Edwards - Engell Speyer Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs

Adrienne Edwards

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Whitney Museum of American Art

Title

Engell Speyer Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs

Institution at time of Fellowship

Whitney Museum of American Art

Mentor

James Rondeau, Art Institute of Chicago

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Adrienne Edwards is Engell Speyer Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum. She was co-curator of the 2022 Whitney Biennial with David Breslin. Edwards curated Jason Moran, the artist’s first museum show, which originated at the Walker in 2018, and traveled nationally. She organized the event and video commencing the construction of David Hammons’s Day’s End, and Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise with WuTsang, boychild, and Fred Moten. She curated Dave McKenzie’s first solo museum project in New York City and My Barbarian’s twenty-year survey, both presented in 2021.

While at the Walker, Edwards co-led the Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Initiative, commissioning, contextualizing, and collecting cross-disciplinary works. For Performa, she realized boundary-defying commissions, as well as pathfinding conferences and film programs with over forty international artists. Edwards’s curatorial projects include the critically acclaimed 2016 exhibition and catalogue Blackness in Abstraction, as well as Frieze’s 2018 Artist Award and the Live program ASSEMBLY in New York. Edwards is Visiting Critic at the University of Pennsylvania, and taught art history at New York University and The New School. She contributes to numerous artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, and academic journals.

Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch - Director of Collections & Department Head and Teel Curator for African and Oceanic Art

Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Title

Director of Collections & Department Head and Teel Curator for African and Oceanic Art

Institution at time of Fellowship

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Mentor

Martha Tedeschi, Harvard Art Museums

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Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch is Director of Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she is responsible for the institution’s accessions strategy and process. Gunsch is also Department Head and Teel Curator for the Arts of Africa and Oceania, and is currently is preparing a reinstallation of the African collection that features the MFA’s outstanding collection of Nigerian art. Since joining the MFA in 2014, Gunsch curated Made Visible: Contemporary Fashion and Identity in South Africa, developed annual joint programming with Boston-area African Diaspora groups, and published The Benin Bronze Plaques: A 16th Century Imperial Monument(Routledge 2018) in addition to a highlights book on the collection. 

Gunsch was previously the Associate Curator for African Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she reinstalled the collection in new and expanded galleries. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2012, studying the art of the Benin kingdom in present-day Nigeria. Before graduate school, Gunsch headed the development department of Plan USA, a global children’s non-profit organization, and supported journalists in Africa with Internews Network. Gunsch earned her BA at American University in 2001.

Shawnya Harris - Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art

Shawnya Harris

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Georgia Museum of Art

Title

Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art

Institution at time of Fellowship

Georgia Museum of Art

Mentor

Alex Nyerges, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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Shawnya L. Harris, Ph.D. is the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art at the Georgia Museum of Art, where she has worked since 2015. Harris has curated numerous exhibitions including Mary Bendolph: Quilted Memories, Richard Hunt: Synthesis, and Expanding Tradition: Selections from the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Collection, whose publication garnered the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award in African American art history in 2018. She is currently organizing a 2021 traveling retrospective and publication centering on the work of artist Emma Amos (1937-2020).

Harris began her career as a museum professional in North Carolina as the director and curator of the University Galleries at North Carolina A&T State University. She earned a Ph.D. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is an alumna of Yale University.

Humberto Moro - TRUSTEE AT-LARGE

Humberto Moro

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Dia Art Foundation

Title

TRUSTEE AT-LARGE

Institution at time of Fellowship

Museo Tamayo

Mentor

Jessica Morgan, Dia Art Foundation

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Deputy Director of Program, Dia Art Foundation

Humberto Moro is Deputy Director of Program at Dia Art Foundation where he oversees the exhibitions, publications and learning and engagement departments. He was previously Deputy Director and Senior Curator at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, where he curated OTRXS MUNDXS, a large-scale survey of artists working in the city, and solo shows by Erick Meyenberg, Tania Pérez Córdova and Ugo Rondinone. He was Curator of the 2021 Exposure section at EXPO Chicago; and from 2016-22, Adjunct Curator at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, where he co-organized Frederick Douglass: Embers of Freedom and Points of Contact by Elizabeth Catlett, and solo exhibitions by Kenturah Davis, Glen Fogel, Alex Gardner, Oliver Laric, Cynthia Gutiérrez, Pia Camil, Mariana Castillo Deball, Tom Burr, Yang Fudong, FOS, AES+F, Mark Wallinger, Isaac Julien, and Anna Maria Maiolino, among others. Moro has previously held curatorial positions at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Moro curated Other Situations, a project by Liliana Porter which included THEM, a theater play at The Kitchen, the reopening exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, and a publication. He was the recipient of the 2016 Estancias Tabacalera Research Award for Latin-American curators, Madrid, Spain, and was part of the 7th Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course, in Gwangju, South Korea. Moro holds a BFA in painting from the Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato; and a MA in curatorial studies by the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, New York; and is part of the 2021 cohort of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL).

Veronica Roberts - John and Jill Freidenrich Director

Veronica Roberts

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

Title

John and Jill Freidenrich Director

Institution at time of Fellowship

Blanton Museum of Art

Mentor

Christina Nielsen, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

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Veronica Roberts is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, a position she has held since 2013. At the Blanton, she has curated nationally touring exhibitions Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser and Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, and exhibitions of Vincent Valdez, Donald Moffett, and Charles White (in collaboration with Black Studies at UT), among others. She worked closely with Ellsworth Kelly to help realize the artist’s only building, Austin, a contemplative chapel-like space with three monumental stained glass windows that opened in early 2018.

This spring, alongside MacKenzie Stevens, Director of the Visual Arts Center at UT, she created a Texas Curator group to foster collaboration among curators within the state.

Prior to moving to Austin, Veronica held curatorial positions at MoMA, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum, and served as Director of Research for the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Catalogue Raisonné. She received her MA from UCSB and her BA in art history from Williams College.

Jamaal B. Sheats - Director and Curator of Galleries, Assistant Professor of Art

Jamaal B. Sheats

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Fisk University

Title

Director and Curator of Galleries, Assistant Professor of Art

Institution at time of Fellowship

Fisk University

Mentor

Glenn Lowry, The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA

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Jamaal B. Sheats, MFA began his career as an artist and is currently the Director and Curator of Fisk University Galleries-- and an Assistant Professor in the university’s Art Department. Since joining the Galleries in 2015, he has curated 18 exhibitions, expanded and nurtured partnerships, and designed innovative programs to foster access to, and engagement with the collections. The Student Gallery Ambassador Program, Babies in the Gallery, and the STEAM Series are exemplary efforts. To further amplify programming, Sheats instituted the Friends of the Gallery campaign. An art advocate committed to training and preparing diverse art leaders, he led a team that secured Ford Foundation and Walton Family Foundation funding (Diversity in Art Museum Leadership Initiative) to establish the Fisk University Museum Leadership Program.

As an artist, he received commissions from entities such as the National Museum of African-American Music and the 2019 Havana Biennial as part of Maria Magdalena Campos- Pons’ Intermittent Rivers. Sheats is a Trustee of the Frist Art Museum and Board Member of the HBCU Alliance of Museums and Galleries; Association of Academic Museum and Galleries; and the Maddox Fund. He received a MFA from Tufts University and BS in Art from Fisk University.

Anne Collins Smith - Curator of Collections

Anne Collins Smith

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Spelman College Museum of Fine Art

Title

Curator of Collections

Institution at time of Fellowship

Spelman College Museum of Fine Art

Mentor

Johanna Burton, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

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Anne Collins Smith is a cultural curator, art historian, and cultural worker in the literary, visual, and performing arts. She currently serves as the Curator of Collections at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.

Smith was the 1999–2000 Romare Bearden Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College where she curated The Space Between: Artists Engaging Race and Syncretism (2003). Smith has curated collection exhibitions Showcase & Tell (2009), Multiple Choice: Perspectives on the Spelman College Collection (2013), and PRESENCE: Meditations on the Spelman College Collection(2019), Maren Hassinger . . . Dreaming (2015) and Howardena Pindell(2015) are among the exhibitions she co- organized at Spelman.

Smith’s interests include arts and the economy, arts leadership, audience development, cosmopolitanism, the evolving role of the curator, material culture, public art, visual culture, and African Diasporic continuity in artistic and cultural practices. In all that Smith undertakes in her avocation as a cultural worker, it is the uplifting and celebration of culture and shared heritage in addition to and assisting to create definition from a multitude of perspectives that drives her work.

Catherine Taft - Curator and Deputy Director

Catherine Taft

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

LAXART

Title

Curator and Deputy Director

Institution at time of Fellowship

LAXART

Mentor

Courtney J Martin, Yale Center for British Art

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Catherine Taft is the curator and deputy director of LAXART,a non-profit exhibition space in Los Angeles. Previously, she was assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she co-organized the inaugural show of its new building, “America is Hard to See” (2015) and curatorial associate in the department of architecture and contemporary art at the Getty Research Institute where she helped produce the exhibitions “Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970” (2011) and “California Video” (2008). Her essays specializing in experimental film and video, critical theory, and modern and contemporary art have appeared in such publications as Artforum, Art Review, Modern Painters, and in exhibition catalogues and monographs on artists including Carroll Dunham, Elliot Hundley, Yayoi Kusama, and Suzanne Lacy. At LAXART, she has organized exhibitions featuring new work by Hilton Als, Josh Kline, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, among others. She is currently working on a major exhibition of ecofeminist art for which she received a research fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Lanka Tattersall - Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

Lanka Tattersall

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Program

CCL Class of 2021

Institution

Museum of Modern Art

Title

Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

Institution at time of Fellowship

Museum of Modern Art

Mentor

Manuel Borja-Villel, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

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Lanka Tattersall is a recently appointed Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art. Previously, she was Associate Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), where she organized the exhibitions Cameron Rowland: D37 (2018), Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin (2018), Lauren Halsey: we still here, there(2018), and Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun(2016), among other exhibitions. At MOCA, she spearheaded a number of important commissions and performances, including works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Rafa Esparza, Juliana Huxtable, and Patrick Staff. From 2010 to 2014, Tattersall was a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, where she was an integral part of the curatorial and editorial teams for the touring retrospective and its accompanying monograph, Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, organized by Kathy Halbreich, former Associate Director, MoMA; with Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern, and Tattersall.