CCL Fellowship Participants

Paola Antonelli’s work investigates design’s influence on everyday experience, often including overlooked objects and practices, and combining design, architecture, art, science and technology. In addition to her role as Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, Paola was appointed director of a new Research and Development initiative in 2012. She lectures frequently at high-level global conferences and coordinates cultural discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos. A true interdisciplinary, energetic and generous cultural thinker, Paola was recently rated as one of the top one hundred most powerful people in the world of art by Art Review.

Dr. Andrea Bayer was educated at Barnard College (Columbia University; class of 1978) and Princeton University, where she wrote a dissertation on the arts in Brescia in the early sixteenth century under the direction of Prof. John Shearman (PhD. 1990).  She has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1989, first in the Department of Prints and Photographs and, from 1990, in the Department of European Paintings.  There she has been involved in numerous exhibitions, including Jusepe de Ribera 1591-1652 (1992); Giambattista Tiepolo 1696-1770 (1996); Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara (1998-1999); The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis. The Music of Silence (2000-2001); Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy (2004); Antonello da Messina: Sicily’s Renaissance Master (2005-2006); Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008- 2009); and most recently The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini(2011), and Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo(2012).  She has written extensively on north Italian painting of the Renaissance, including two Museum Bulletins on painting north of the Apennines (2003 and 2005),  and a chapter on the arts of Brescia and Bergamo in Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance: Venice and the Veneto (ed. Peter Humfrey) (2007).  Some of her lecturing in recent years has concentrated on collecting and connoisseurship, including two papers for The Frick Collection’s Center for the History of Collecting in America (2010 and 2013).  Dr. Bayer has been a Curator in the Department of European Paintings since 2007 and was the Coordinating Curator for Curatorial Studies, the graduate program run by the Metropolitan Museum and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, from 2007-2012. She was the Interim Head of the Department of Education at the Metropolitan Museum in 2009, and is currently at work on a group of special projects for the Director’s Office connected with the re-launch of the Museum’s website in 2012 and numerous other initiatives related to the visitor’s experience. She was a member of the Center for Curatorial Leadership class of 2012. Last year she was a member of the team responsible for the complete reinstallation of the European Paintings galleries, opening in May 2013.  In early 2014 she was appointed Co-Chair of the Director’s Exhibition Committee.  She has just been named the Jayne Wrightsman Curator, a title that went into effect on July 1, 2014.

Christa Clarke, Ph.D., is an independent curator/art historian and an affiliate of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Previously, she was Senior Curator, Arts of Global Africa at the Newark Museum, where she pioneered Newark’s collecting of modern and contemporary African art and organized numerous exhibitions over her sixteen-year tenure.  They include Power Dressing: Men’s Fashion and Prestige in Africa (2005); Another Modernity: Works on Paper by Uche Okeke (2006), Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art (2008); and Hassan Hajjaj: My Rock Stars (2015) as well as major commissions by Yinka Shonibare MBE, Simone Leigh and Odili Odita. Recent independent projects range from Peggy Guggenheim’s collecting of African art to the work of artist Sanford Biggers. Clarke’s curatorial work has been supported by major grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Active as a scholar and teacher, Clarke has been a fellow at the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Clark Art Institute, and held teaching appointments at NYU Abu Dhabi, University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University, and Rutgers University. Her publications include Representing Africa in American Art Museums (co-edited with Kathleen Berzock; 2010), African Art at the Barnes Foundation (2015), and Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection (2018) as well as numerous essays and exhibition catalogues. A 2012 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, Clarke is committed to advancing equity in museums which she has furthered through her longtime involvement with the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), most recently serving as its President from 2017-2019 and now Trustee Emerita. She is currently completing a book, The Activist Collector: An African American Woman in Pre-Apartheid South Africa, a biography of a collection formed in 1938 by Newark, NJ resident Lida Clanton Broner.

Thomas Andrew Denenberg is the director of Shelburne Museum.  Prior to moving to Vermont in 2011, he served as the chief curator and deputy director of the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine), curator of American art at Reynolda House (Winston-Salem, North Carolina), and curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, Connecticut).  Tom received a B.A. in history from Bates College and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University.  He has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and Winterthur and taught at Boston University, Harvard, and Wake Forest.  He is the author of Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (Yale University Press, 2003), Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place (Portland Museum of art, 2010), and he edited and/or contributed to Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (Smithsonian Institution, 1999), Backstage Pass: Rock and Roll Photography (Yale University Press, 2008), Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England (Yale University Press, 2009), Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine (Yale University Press, 2012), Wyeth Vertigo (University Press of New England, 2013), and Painting a Nation: American Art at Shelburne Museum (Rizzoli, 2017).    

Leah Dickerman is the first Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. Previously, she was Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA. Before coming to MoMA in 2008, Dickerman was a curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2001-2007). Over her career, Dickerman has organized or co-organized a series of prizewinning multi-media exhibitions that offer new perspectives on the modern, including Inventing Abstraction, 1912-1925 (2012-2013), Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011-2012), Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity (2009-2010), Dada(2005-2006), and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1998). She is currently preparing an exhibition on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series, scheduled for 2015, and a retrospective of the work of Robert Rauschenberg, scheduled for 2016. She has been on the editorial board of the journal October since 2001. Dickerman is the Director of The Museum Research Consortium, a new partnership between MoMA and graduate art history programs at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, The Institute of Fine Arts and The Graduate Center at The City University of New York.

Elizabeth Finch is Head Curator at the Colby College Museum of Art. In this role, Beth shapes the Colby Museum’s artistic, research, and interpretive programs and serves on the museum’s leadership team. She holds degrees in art history from the University of California at Berkeley (B.A.) and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (PhD). Beth began her curatorial career as a participant in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, after which she became a curatorial assistant at the Whitney; she then worked at the Drawing Center, New York, where she held various positions including, ultimately, that of Curator. She was named the Colby Museum’s Lunder Curator of American Art in 2008 and led from this platform until 2021, when she transitioned to her current appointment. In addition to her CCL fellowship, Beth was the recipient of an Art Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation for her research on the Bauhaus diaspora in the United States. A skilled collaborator and lifelong arts advocate who believes in deep listening and close looking, Beth has curated and co-curated dozens of exhibitions nationally and internationally and has published and edited books, articles, and essays related to many of these projects as well as other subjects.

John B. Ravenal is Executive Director of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. He was previously the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a position he has held since 1998. Before that, he was the Associate Curator of 20th-Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include Ryan McGinness: Studio Visit (2014); Xu Bing: Tobacco Project(2011), and Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit (2010). He is currently organizing Jasper Johns/Edvard Munch(2016; produced in partnership with the Munch Museum, Oslo), the first exhibition to explore the connection between these two artists. Ravenal earned his BA in art history from Wesleyan University and his MA and MPhil in art history from Columbia University. He served as the fourth president of the Association of Art Museum Curators (2009-11).

Elizabeth Smith was named the first Executive Director of the New York-based Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in 2013.  Previously she was Executive Director, Curatorial Affairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.   Smith has curated major monographic exhibitions of artists including Jenny Holzer, Lee Bontecou, Kerry James Marshall, and Cindy Sherman as well as exhibitions on architecture such as Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, The Architecture of R.M. Schindler.  She authored Techno Architecture(2000) and Case Study Houses (2002/2006) and has contributed essays to numerous additional publications including, most recently, Do Ho Suh Drawings and Helen Frankenthaler: Composing with Color, 1962-1963 (both 2014).   Smith is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC).

Martha Tedeschi was appointed Deputy Director for Art and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago in August 2012. In this capacity, she oversees matters related to research, collections, and curatorial practice, including the Institute’s Libraries and Archives, the Conservation, Conservation Science, and Publishing programs, as well the day-to-day activities of eleven curatorial departments. She also serves as the Art Institute’s liaison to local universities and to foundations. Prior to her current appointment, she held the Prince Trust Curatorship in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute.

Tedeschi received her B.A. with honors from Brown University, an M.A. from the University of Michigan, and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University (1994). She is the general editor and co-author of The Lithographs of James McNeill Whistler (1998 and  the organizing curator of the exhibition Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light (2008), as well as for its sequel, John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism (201). Her most recent exhibition was Undressed: The Fashion of Privacy (2013). Tedeschi is the recent past president of the Print Council of America (2009-2013). 

Stanton Thomas received his Ph. D. in the subject of Flemish Art from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. As part of his program of study, he spent two years in Leuven, Belgium under the auspices of the Vlaamse Gemeenschap and the Belgian American Education Foundation. He also holds an M.A. from the University of Missouri, Columbia and a B.S. from Truman University. In addition, Dr. Thomas completed the Attingham Summer School Program in 2007. 

After his graduation in 1998, Dr. Thomas was a visiting professor at Case Western for two years. He then held the post of Assistant Curator of Paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Currently Dr. Thomas is the Curator of European Paintings and Decorative Arts at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee. 

Dr. Thomas resides in Memphis, Tennessee with his wife Geneviève Hill-Thomas. His spouse is a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington in West African Art History. 

Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Ph.D. is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), where she works on projects related to contemporary black life. She is the co-curator of two inaugural exhibitions at the NMAAHC: A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond and A Century in the Making: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Wilkinson is also developing the museum’s collections in architecture and design.

Prior to NMAAHC, spent six years as Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture. In that capacity, she curated over twenty exhibitions, including the critically-acclaimed A People’s Geography: The Spaces of African American Life, and two award-winning shows: For Whom It Stands: The Flag and the American People and Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists.

Wilkinson holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. from Emory University. From 1999-2002, she was an assistant professor of African American, Puerto Rican, and Caribbean literature at Bard College in New York. In 2002, Wilkinson entered the museum field seeking to fulfill her passion for the arts, writing, scholarly research, and public engagement. Since then, she has worked on exhibitions, publications, and public programs for the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she held the position of Editor and Library Coordinator.

Wilkinson’s research interests range from African American and African Diaspora cultural studies to global architecture and design. Wilkinson was a 2012 fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City, and completed a short-term residency at the Design Museum in London as part of her fellowship. Her honors and awards include fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Her interdisciplinary research project, “V is for Veranda,” about architectural heritage in the Anglophone Caribbean, has been presented to international audiences in Suriname, England, India, and the United States.

Wilkinson is active on several boards and committees in the museum field. She is the editor of For Whom It Stands: The Flag and the American People and she has published critical essays in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement and Potentially Harmful: The Art of American Censorship. Her writing also has appeared in the International Review of African American Art, ARC Magazine: Contemporary Caribbean Visual Art and Culture, Studio: The Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Black Issues Book Review, and Revue Noire: Art Contemporain Africain, among others.