CCL Fellowship Participants

René Morales is Director of Curatorial Affairs and Chief Curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami, where he has organized over 50 exhibitions. Recent curatorial projects at PAMM include Meleko Mokgosi: Your Trip to Africa; Christo and Jeanne- Claude: Surrounded Islands, 1980–83; Dara Friedman: Perfect Stranger; Sarah Oppenheimer: S-281913; Marjetica Potrc: The School of the Forest; Bik Van der Pol: Speechless; Monika Sosnowska: Market; and Amelia Peláez: The Craft of Modernity. Morales is currently working on a major career survey of the work of Gary Simmons. Morales has spearheaded numerous major acquisitions for PAMM’s permanent collection, including a set of nearly 400 works from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, as well as over 50 works purchased through PAMM’s Collectors Council. He has written essays for various publications, including Cabinet and numerous exhibition catalogues. Morales is currently teaching Museum History and Theory/Curatorial Practices at Florida International University. Prior to joining PAMM (formerly Miami Art Museum), Morales worked at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, where he co-organized Island Nations: New Art from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, among other exhibitions. Morales, who grew up in Miami, received his BA from Swarthmore College and his MA in Art History from Brown University.

Sarah Kelly Oehler is the Field-McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has been since 2002 in increasing positions of responsibility. Her most recent exhibition was Charles White: A Retrospective, the first major retrospective of this influential African American artist. Other projects include Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon Returns to Chicago (2017), America After the Fall:Painting in the 1930s (2016), Shatter Rupture Break: The Modern Series (2015), and They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration (2013). She has contributed to numerous other publications at the museum, including Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine (2013) and American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago from World War I to 1955 (2009).

Oehler is currently Chair of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Curatorial Forum and is a past Chair of the Association of Historians of American Art. She received her Ph.D. in American Art from Columbia University and her B.A. in History from Yale University.

Nora Burnett Abrams is the Mark G. Falcone Director of MCA Denver. Her curatorial career began at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked on the Sol LeWitt on the Roof and Robert Rauschenberg: Combines exhibitions. Since arriving in Denver in 2010, she has organized over 30 exhibitions and authored or contributed to nearly a dozen accompanying publications. Recent projects have highlighted unusual or unknown episodes in artists’ careers such as Basquiat Before Basquiat (2017), as well as the first survey of Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. sculptures (2014). She curated the first U.S. exhibition of Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie and an in-depth study of Ryan McGinley’s earliest photographs and never-before-seen Polaroids. Her upcoming projects include a retrospective of American artist Tara Donovan. Abrams leads the museum's senior team, setting strategies for operations, communications, marketing, and fundraising for the organization, as well as augmenting its role as a cultural driver of the city’s current, unprecedented growth. She has taught art history at New York University and lectured throughout the country on modern and contemporary art. She holds art history degrees from Stanford University (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Kelly Baum is the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has been working as a curator for seventeen years, first at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, then at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and later at the Princeton University Art Museum, where she was the founding curator of modern and contemporary art. In that time, Kelly has authored seven catalogues and organized over two dozen exhibitions, including New Jersey as Nonsite, the recipient of a Warhol Curatorial Fellowship; Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, one of the inaugural shows at the Met Breuer; The Body Politic: Video from The Met Collection; and Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980, a major survey of postwar art through the lens of the irrational. Kelly’s research has been published widely in catalogues, anthologies, and scholarly journals such as October and Art Journal.

A native of Miami, José Carlos Diaz is the Chief Curator at The Andy Warhol Museum. Diaz has organized the first museum solo exhibition of Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri currently on view at The Warhol. Prior to this he was the Curator of Exhibitions at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach where he curated new artist commissions by Athi-Patra Ruga, Sylvie Fleury and the travelling exhibition GOLD. Prior to joining the Bass he worked at Tate Liverpool and the Liverpool Biennal. Diaz received an M.A. in Cultural History from the University of Liverpool and a B.A. in Art History from San Francisco State University. In 2003 Diaz tenured as a curatorial intern at The Rubell Family Collection and launched a nomadic curatorial project called Worm-Hole Laboratory.

Alison Ferris, Senior Curator at the Des Moines Art Center, has been a curator of contemporary art for more than 20 years. Ferris directs the curatorial, registration, and installation departments that produce approximately 15 exhibitions per year and oversee the care and conservation of the 5,500 object collection including 28 works in the Pappajohn Sculpture Park. She works closely with the director on acquisitions and is also part of the leadership team that guides the vision of the Art Center.

Joining the Art Center in February 2016, Ferris reinstalled the permanent collection and curated two major 2017 exhibitions: RupturesandDrawing in Space. Currently she is organizing the first major solo exhibitions in the United States for British artist Susan Collis (2019) and Scottish artist Karla Black (2020). Ferris is committed to supporting art by women and people-of-color and frequently works with international artists who have installation, photography, and material-based practices.

Prior to her appointment at the Art Center, Ferris was Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Ferris holds an M.A. in Art History from Binghamton University, N.Y. and a B.A. in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Rita Gonzalez is Curator and Acting Department Head in Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she has curated Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement; Asco: Elite of the Obscure; Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection; Agnès Varda in Californialand; and A Universal History of Infamy, among other exhibitions. Gonzalez’s collaboration with filmmaker Jesse Lerner, Mexperimental Cinema, was the first survey of Mexican experimental film and video. It traveled to museums and festivals internationally and resulted in the first bilingual publication on the subject. From 1997–1999, she was the Lila Wallace Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. While there, she worked on numerous exhibitions, as well as serving as curator for William Kentridge: Weighing and Wanting. She also co-curated the 2006 California Biennial and Adrià Julià: La Villa Basque at the Orange County Museum of Art. Essays appear in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Duke University Press), Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from 90s to Now (JRP|Ringier Zurich), and California Video: Artists and Histories (Getty Publications). Gonzalez was on the curatorial team for Prospect 3 New Orleans and a curatorial advisor on the first Current L.A. Biennial in 2016.

Jodi Hauptman is Senior Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art.  Her many exhibitions and publications include Edgar Degas:  A Strange New Beauty (2016); Henri Matisse:  The Cut-Outs (with Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator) (2014–15); Georges Seurat: The Drawings (2007–08); and Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon (2005–06). Hauptman has lectured widely and has contributed essays to exhibition catalogues, edited volumes, and scholarly journals on modern and contemporary artists, including Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Fernand Léger, Medardo Rosso, and Léopold Survage. She oversaw The Museum of Modern Art’s multi-exhibition partnerships with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, and organized MoMA’s first exhibition in China. Hauptman is the author of Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (Yale University Press, 1999), winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Charles Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. She has taught at Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of Delaware. Hauptman received her A.B. from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Yale University.

Lauren Haynes is the Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs at the Queens Museum. Previously, she was the Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Prior to joining the Nasher, Haynes was Director of Artist Initiatives and Curator, Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas. Haynes led the curatorial team for State of the Art 2020, the second iteration of State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now (2014), which opened at both Crystal Bridges and the Momentary in February 2020. Haynes’s recent curatorial projects include Kenny Rivero: The Floor is Crooked (2021); Crystal Bridges at 10 (2021); Sarah Cain: In Nature (2021); Crystals in Art: Ancient to Today (2019) and The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art (2018). Prior to joining Crystal Bridges, Haynes spent nearly a decade at The Studio Museum in Harlem. As a specialist in African-American contemporary art, Haynes curated dozens of exhibitions at the Studio Museum and contemporary art institutions in New York. Haynes was a 2018 Center for Curatorial Leadership fellow and a recipient of a 2020 ArtTable New Leadership Award.

Ethan W. Lasser is the Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. Curator of American Art and the Head of the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. Lasser is responsible for the Museums’ collections of American paintings, sculpture, and decorative art to 1900, and he oversees the curatorial team responsible for the Medieval to 1900 collection of western art. Lasser’s 2017 exhibition The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet reassembled the extraordinary collection of works of art and teaching tools that Harvard College amassed in the late-eighteenth century. Other recent projects include the reinstallation of the Harvard Art Museums (2014), the Minding Making project (2013-ongoing), The Tool at Hand (2012) and To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter (2010). Lasser is currently at work on Silver: A Material History, an exhibition that will reach across the fine, industrial, and decorative arts.

Lasser graduated from Williams College and received a Ph.D. from Yale University. From 2007 to 2012, he served as Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee.  In 2012, Lasser was awarded the Phillip and Patricia Frost Essay Award for excellent scholarship in the field of American art history.

Soyoung Lee, Curator in the Department of Asian Art, has been at The Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2003. She has organized critically acclaimed international loan exhibitions including Silla: Korea’s Golden Kingdom (2013) and Poetry in Clay: Korean Buncheong Ceramics from Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (2011), each with an accompanying catalogue. Her upcoming show, Diamond Mountains: Travel and Nostalgia in Korean Art (spring 2018) explores representations of the iconic site (in today’s North Korea) from the 18th century to today. She is also a collaborator on a special exhibition of jewelry at The Met (fall 2018). Soyoung received her Ph.D. from Columbia University with a dissertation that examined the influence of 15th-16th century Korean ceramics on major ceramic industries in Kyushu, Japan, and the subsequent Japanese reinterpretations. Her research interests include cross-cultural exchanges in East Asian Art. Soyoung served as Chair of the Metropolitan Museum’s Forum of Curators, Conservators, and Scientists in 2016-17 and is currently the Forum’s Delegate to the Board of Trustees. She is also a trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators.

Victoria Sancho Lobis recently joined Pomona College as the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, which will open to the public in the fall of 2020. Lobis also serves as affiliated faculty in Pomona’s Art History Department. 

Prior to her work at the Benton, Lobis worked for the Art Institute of Chicago from 2013 through 2019 in a variety of curatorial and administrative roles, including her service as Interim Chair of the Department of Prints and Drawings from April 2016 through May 2017. In September of 2019, she completed a multi-year project related to the museum’s holdings of Dutch and Flemish drawings, culminating in a scholarly catalogue and exhibition of the same name (Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drawing in the Golden Age). Before the Art Institute, Lobis worked for four years as the inaugural curator of the print collection at the University of San Diego. She has also held curatorial internships and fellowships at The J. Paul Getty Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Lobis received her B.A. from Yale College, her M.A. from Williams College, and her Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation on workshop practice in the time of Peter Paul Rubens. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions across a broad geographical and historical range, including projects treating medieval manuscript illuminations, early modern prints and drawings, Viceregal Latin American painting, Whistler and his influence, modern and contemporary Latin American works on paper and contemporary American drawings. She has also published in the fields of contemporary artists’ books and contemporary American photography.