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.

Carlos Basualdo - Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art

Carlos Basualdo

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Program

CCL Class of 2013

Institution

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Title

Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art

Institution at time of Fellowship

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Mentors

Richard Armstrong, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Michael Govan, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

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Carlos Basualdo is the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he oversees the Museum's Department of Contemporary Art. In 2006, he initiated two exhibition series at the Museum called “Notations” and “Live Cinema,” both of which are devoted to the permanent collection and video. He was the lead organizer of “Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens” that represented the United States at the 2007 Venice Biennale, where it was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. In 2010 he organized a survey exhibition of the work of the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, a collaboration between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and MAXXI (Museo nazionale delle arti del secolo XXI), where it traveled in the spring of 2011. Most recently, he organized “Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp,” which opened in Philadelphia in October of 2012 and is currently on display at the Barbican Gallery until June 9th.

He has was part of the curatorial teams for Documenta11, the 50th Venice Biennale and conceived and curated “Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture,” which traveled from the MCA Chicago to the Barbican Gallery in London (2004/2005) as well as the Bronx Museum in New York and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro (2006/2007). From 2010 until 2013 he worked as Curator at Large at MAXXI Arte, in Rome, Italy. 

Kathleen Berzock - Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs

Approaching mid-career I was searching to understand how to articulate the experiences and skills, beyond my curatorial specialization, that I had accumulated over two decades of curatorial work. I was ready for bigger responsibilities and a more influential leadersh...

Kathleen Berzock

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Kathleen Bickford Berzock (Ph.D., Art History, Indiana University, 1995) is Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, where she provides artistic leadership of the museum’s exhibition program and collection strategy in support of the museum’s cross-cultural and interdisciplinary mission. Berzock has a strong interest in museum practice and history, particularly in regard to African art. She was curator of African Art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1995 – 2013. There she oversaw the development and display of the museum’s African art collection and presented internationally acclaimed exhibitions, including Benin—Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria (2008) and For Hearth and Altar: African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection (2005), for which she also authored the scholarly catalogue. She was also research assistant for African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1993-1995). She is co-editor (with Christa Clarke) and contributor to the volume Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (2010), which includes essays on the history of thirteen museum collections and through them chronicles the shifts in meaning and public perception of African art in this country. Other museum publications include Benin: Royal Arts of a West African Kingdom (AIC, 2008) and The Miracles of Mary: A 17th Century Ethiopian Manuscript (AIC, 2002).

Jason Busch - Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO

The Center for Curatorial Leadership provided me with an extraordinary opportunity to understand the balance of museum leadership, management, and curation, lessons that continue to influence my career.

Jason Busch

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Program

CCL Class of 2013

Institution

American Folk Art Museum

Title

Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO

Institution at time of Fellowship

Carnegie Museum of Art

Residency

Saint Louis Art Museum

Mentors

Brent Benjamin, Saint Louis Art Museum

Kaywin Feldman, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

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Jason T. Busch is the Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO of the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) in New York. Busch has several decades of experience working in the arts throughout the United States. Prior to AFAM, Busch served as assistant curator of decorative arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford; associate curator of architecture, design, decorative arts, craft, and sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art; chief curator and curator of decorative arts and design at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; deputy director for curatorial affairs and museum programs at the Saint Louis Art Museum; division director for decorative arts at Sotheby’s, New York; and director of the Jason Jacques Gallery, New York. He has curated several large exhibitions and collection installations and authored the associated publications, including Currents of Change: Art and Life Along the Mississippi River, 1850–1861 (2004); Carnegie Museum of Art: Decorative Arts and Design Collection (2009); and Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (2012).

Judith Dolkart - Deputy Director

Judith Dolkart

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Judith F. Dolkart is Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy. Previously, she served as deputy director of art and archival collections and Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation. Joining in 2010, Ms. Dolkart helped plan the relocation of the collections to Philadelphia. Under her stewardship, the Barnes launched an exhibition program and published three books in 2012, notably The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks and Renoir in the Barnes Foundation.

Prior to 2010, Ms. Dolkart spent nine years at the Brooklyn Museum, New York. Her exhibitions included ‘Michelangelo of the Menagerie’: Bronzes by Antoine-Louis Barye (2005) and James Tissot: The Life of Christ (2009). She coordinated Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea (2009). 

Ms. Dolkart received her BA from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges and her MA from the University of Pennsylvania. She taught art history at Hunter College, New York, in 2008-2009. She is on the Board of Trustees for the Association of Art Museum Curators. 

Andrea Grover - Executive Director

Andrea Grover

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Program

CCL Class of 2013

Institution

Guild Hall

Title

Executive Director

Institution at time of Fellowship

Parrish Museum of Art

Residency

Walker Art Center

Mentors

Adam Lerner, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

Olga Viso, Walker Art Center

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Andrea Grover is the Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish Art Museum, where she is initiating new models for temporary and off-site exhibitions via the Museum’s Platform and Parrish Road Show series. From 1998–2008, she was the Founding Director of Houston’s Aurora Picture Show, a non-profit cinema specializing in media art and the presentation of multi-disciplinary performances and screenings. In addition to ten years of film and video programming at Aurora, she has curated film programs for both the Dia Art Foundation and The Menil Collection. In 2010, she was awarded a Warhol Curatorial Fellowship, jointly hosted by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, to research artists working at the intersection of science and technology. The outcome of that Fellowship is the 2011 publication, “New Art/Science Affinities,” co-authored with Claire Evans, Régine Debatty, Pablo Garcia, and the design collaborative Thumb, that profiles over 60 contemporary artists working in maker culture, hacking, artistic research, citizen science, and computational art. The corresponding exhibition, Intimate Science, opened at Miller Gallery in January 2012, and toured to Southern Exposure, San Francisco, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA, and Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC), Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY. Intimate Science followed her earlier exploration of artists working across disciplines in 29 Chains to the Moon, an exhibition curated for Miller Gallery in 2009. Her earliest exhibitions exploring collective creativity were Phantom Captain, presented at apexart, New York, in 2006, and Never Been to Tehran, co-curated with artist Job Rubin, and presented at Parkingallery, Tehran, Iran, in 2008. She studied visual art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 1995), Syracuse University (BFA 1992), and Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design (1991). She was a Core Fellow in residence at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 1995-1997, and was a 2013 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. Her forthcoming exhibitions include Maya Lin: Platform, Parrish Art Museum, 2014, and Radical Seafaring, Parrish Art Museum, 2016.

Leo Jansen - Senior Researcher, Mondrian Edition Project

For me the CCL experience was as much a new way of looking at the challenges for today’s museums from a leadership perspective as it was a discovery into my own competences and aspirations.

Leo Jansen

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Leo Jansen studied Dutch Language and Literature at the University of Utrecht (1960) where he specialized in 19th and 20th-century literature and scholarly editing. From 1994 till 2009 he was an editor of the Van Gogh Letters Project, the result of which was published in October 2009 as a digital edition on the internet entitled Vincent van Gogh, The Letters(www.vangoghletters.org; awarded by Europa Nostra), and in a widely acclaimed, six volume printed edition (published simultaneously in English, Dutch and French). He co-curated the exhibition Van Gogh’s letters: the artist speaks (Van Gogh Museum, 2009-2010; awarded by AICA, The Netherlands). From December 2005 till April 2014 he was the Van Gogh Museum’s curator of paintings. He curated an exhibition of the Van Gogh Museum's collection in the Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam (September 2012) and he is currently co-curating the exhibition Munch-Van Gogh, a joint project with the Munch Museum, Oslo (Spring 2015). As a scholar he is the editor of several literary and art historical periodicals and projects.

As of May 2014 he’s a researcher at Huygens ING, The Hague (Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History), preparing a digital publication of Piet Mondrian’s complete correspondence and theoretical writings.

Emily Ballew Neff - Executive Director

Emily Ballew Neff

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Program

CCL Class of 2013

Institution

San Antonio Museum of Art

Title

Executive Director

Institution at time of Fellowship

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Mentors

Kimerly Rorschach, Seattle Art Museum

Axel Rüger, Van Gogh Museum

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Emily Ballew Neff is the Executive Director of Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Previously, she served as Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director and Chief Curator of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma, and has been President of Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) since May 2013. She also served as the first curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she helped the trustees and institution’s leadership establish a significant presence for the museum in the field of American art, grew the museum’s collections by more than 30 percent, built a dynamic patron support group, organized more than 20 exhibitions at the museum, and coordinated 14 traveling shows from other institutions. Interested in organizing exhibitions that push the field of American art in new and innovative directions, Neff most recently mountedAmerican Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World, which received praise for its innovative approach to exhibition colonial art in a global context. Its exhibition catalogue earned an award from Tyler Green as MAN’s best art book of the year for 2013. Other exhibitions includeThe Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950, a show of more than 100 paintings and photographs, including paintings of the Santa Fe Indian School, that examined the role the American West played in the development of American modernism, andJohn Singleton Copley in England, based on her dissertation on the same subject, which revealed the entrepreneurial role the Boston colonial painter played on London’s 18th-century artistic stage. An exhibition particularly celebrated in Houston,American Made: 250 Years of American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presented in 2012, highlighted for the first time in the museum’s history the superb quality and dramatic expansion of its collection. Neff also authoredFrederic Remington: The Hogg Brothers Collectionat the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the first major catalog to document this historically important collection and the Hogg family patron who created it. She has also served as a frequent lecturer and teacher, and served in 2010 as the H.E.R.E. Distinguished Lecturer at Rice University, Houston. Neff holds a B.A. in Art History from Yale University, an M.A. in Art History from Rice University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a recent Fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City.  

Rebecca Rabinow - Director

Rebecca Rabinow

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Rebecca Rabinow, the Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and the Curator-in-Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum joined the staff of the Museum in 1990.  Since that time, she has helped organize more than twenty special exhibitions at the Metropolitan. Her most recent award-winning shows are The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (2011-12) and Matisse: In Search of True Painting (2012-13). Roberta Smith described the latter in The New York Times as “one of the most thrillingly instructive exhibitions about this painter, or painting in general, that you may ever see.” Dr. Rabinow is currently preparing “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection,” which will be on view at the Metropolitan from October 20, 2014-February 16, 2015.  A graduate of Smith College and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, she currently serves as the Chair of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Forum of Curators, Conservators, and Scientists.

Jessica Todd Smith - Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art

Jessica Todd Smith

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Program

CCL Class of 2013

Institution

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Title

Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art

Institution at time of Fellowship

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Residency

Victoria & Albert Museum - V&A

Mentors

Martin Roth, Victoria & Albert Museum - V&A

James Steward, Princeton University Art Museum

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Jessica Todd Smith is the Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and Manager of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she is responsible for American painting and sculpture made between 1900 and 1960. In 2018, she curated Modern Times: American Art 1910−1950 and published American Modernism: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Prior arriving in Philadelphia in 2016, Smith was the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. At the Huntington, she worked on three expansions of the American galleries, the most recent of which opened in October 2016. She organized exhibitions including Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950 (2007-8) and Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame (2011) and wrote American Made: Highlights from the Huntington’s Art Collection (2014), the first book to focus on American art at the Huntington. Smith earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and held internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Harvard University Art Museums. She obtained her A.B. from Harvard University where she graduated summa cum laude.

Nina Zimmer - Director

The CCL experience had a transformative quality for me professionally and personally, and it has helped me shape my thoughts on the future of our institutions.

Nina Zimmer

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Nina Zimmer, born 1973 in Munich, Germany, is curator of 19th century art and Modern art at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland since 2006, and deputy director since 2014. She has been responsible for the exhibitions “Renoir: Between Bohemia and the Bourgeoisie: The Early Years” (2012), “Andy Warhol: The Early Sixties” (2011), “Vincent van Gogh — Between Earth and Heaven: The Landscapes” (2009), “Soutine and Modernism” (2008), “Andreas Gursky“ (2007) and most recently “James Ensor”, “The Picassos Are Here. A Retrospective from Basel Collections“ (2013). Previously, she was assistant curator for contemporary art at Hamburg Kunsthalle, Germany, responsible for the collection catalogue of photography department, and the exhibition “Jean Dubuffet and Orientalism”. Nina Zimmer studied history of art, romance, and media studies in Bordeaux, Göttingen, Münster and Hamburg. Her dissertation was entitled “Collaborative art in the 1960s between Moscow and New York”. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor, Bosch Fellow, at the University of Chicago in 2002, as well as a visiting professor for occidental art theory at the Korean National University of Art in Seoul, South Korea, in 2005.