Participants from CCL Class of 2016

As the McNay Art Museum’s third director and first-ever Hispanic director, Richard Aste’s vision for the first modern art Museum in Texas brings its mission--of engaging a diverse community in the discovery and enjoyment of the visual arts--to life. By focusing on artistic excellence and community impact, Aste champions inclusive, engaging, and impactful exhibitions and programming. As a first time CEO, he has mastered the demands of leadership by building an engaged team, reimagining the museum experience, and cultivating a welcoming atmosphere for all. Aste is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (2016) and Harvard Business School's Executive Program, Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management (2017).

Peter Barberie is the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His exhibition projects include Zoe Strauss: 10 Years (2012), a survey of the artist’s decade-long project to show her work in disused public spaces; and Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography (2014), an in-depth retrospective of Strand’s pioneering career in photography and film. Previously, as the Museum’s Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow, he organized the exhibition Looking at Atget (2005), and co-curated Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery (2007). In 2008 he was guest curator at the Morgan Library and Museum for the exhibition Close Encounters: Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers.

Mr. Barberie holds his B.A. in art history from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of photography and modern art from Princeton University. 

Caroline Campbell is Head of the Curatorial Department and Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500 at the National Gallery, London.  Earlier in her career, Caroline held curatorial positions at The Courtauld Gallery, London (where she was Curator of Paintings from 2005-12), the National Gallery and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Born in Belfast, Caroline was educated at University College, Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.  Her interests encompass the interaction of Byzantine and Italian painting, Cranach, Cézanne and the twentieth century, but Italian Medieval and Renaissance painting and its reception are at the heart of her work as a curator and scholar.  She has curated and co-curated many exhibitions, including Bellini and the East (2005-06), Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (2009); Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting (2014) and Duccio/Caro: In Dialogue (2015).

Doryun Chong was appointed the inaugural Chief Curator at M+, Hong Kong in September 2013 and became Deputy Director and Chief Curator in January 2016. M+, a museum of 20th and 21st-century visual culture at the West Kowloon Cultural District, will open its Herzog and de Meuron-designed buidling in late 2019. At M+, He oversees all curatorial activities, including exhibitions and symposia, acquisitions for the collection, as well as learning and interpretation programs at M+. He is also a co-curator, with Stella Fong, of the one-person presentation of Tsang Kin-Wah at the Hong Kong pavilion in the 2015 Venice Biennale. Previously Chong was Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, where he organized contemporary exhibitions and acquired works for the museum’s collection. At MoMA, he organized Bruce Nauman: Days (2010) and Projects 94: Henrik Olesen (2011), and Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde (2012), and co-edited From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan, 1945-1989: Primary Documents (2013), the first anthology in English of critical documents in the histories of postwar Japanese art, design, and architecture.

Prior to his appointment at MoMA in 2009, Chong held various positions a curator in the Visual Arts department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 2003 to 2009, and co-organized exhibitions including Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider (2009-10); Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis (2008); Brave New Worlds (2007); and House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (2005), which traveled to Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, among other venues. He has also curated or coordinated exhibitions at venues including REDCAT, Los Angeles, the 2006 Busan Biennale, and the Korean Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and his writings have appeared in journals such as Artforum, Afterall, The Exhibitionist, and Parkett, and museum and biennale publications by the Auckland Triennial, the Gwangju Biennale, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and National Museum of Modern And Contemporary Art, Korea. Chong is the recipient of the first ICI Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Award in 2010. He has served on numerous prize juries, including recently the 2015 Hugo Boss Prize, Absolut Art Award, and Contemporary Chinese Art Award.

Jay A. Clarke is Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. From 1997 to 2009 she served as a curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Clarke has been a lecturer in the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College since 2009. She is author of Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (2009) and editor of Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalgia: The Manton Collection of British Art (2012); The Impressionist Line from Edgar Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec (2013); and Hurricanes Waves: Clifford Ross (2015). Clarke has curated exhibitions on a wide variety of artists from Albrecht Dürer to Pablo Picasso to Thomas Struth. She has published articles on Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Edvard Munch, the art dealer and critic Julius Meier-Graefe, and the British linocut movement. Clarke received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.

Susan Fisher is Director of Collections at the Brooklyn Museum. From 2009-17, she was Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation, the Greenwich Village historic townhouse and sculpture studio of American artist Chaim Gross (1904-91). She has previously served as the inaugural Horace W. Goldsmith Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery and on the curatorial staff at the Guggenheim Museum.  The curator and author of Picasso and the Allure of Language (Yale University Press, 2009) and over a dozen articles, she has taught modern art history and museum studies at Fairfield University and Yale University and has lectured nationally and internationally on 19th-century and modern art. She holds a PhD and MA from Yale University and a BA from Oberlin College.

Vera Ingrid Grant is the director of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. She most recently curated THE WOVEN ARC (Summer 2016); the Art of Jazz: NOTES (Spring 2016) at the Cooper Gallery; and The Persuasions of Montford at the Boston Center for the Arts (Spring 2015). Her curatorial approach leverages theories of visual culture to create an immersive exhibition experience charged with object driven dialogues.  Grant is a Fulbright Scholar (University of Hamburg), has an MA in Modern European History from Stanford University,  and is currently a fellow (2015-16) at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL). Her recent publications include: Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy, as editor; and author of: “E2: Extraction/Exhibition Dynamics” (Harvard University Press, January 2015); “Visual Culture and the Occupation of the Rhineland,” The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 5, The Twentieth Century, (Harvard University Press, February 2014); and “White Shame/Black Agency: Race as a Weapon in Post-World War I Diplomacy” in African Americans in American Foreign Policy, (University of Illinois Press, February 2014).

Randall R. Griffey is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to the Metropolitan, Griffey held curatorial positions at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (1999 – 2008) and the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College (2008 – 2012).  At the Metropolitan, Griffey has organized Reimagining Modernism: 1900 – 1950, a comprehensive reinterpretation of the museum’s collections of European and American modern painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and design. He also co-curated Thomas Hart Benton’sAmerica Today Mural Rediscovered.  Among his publications are the journal article “Marsden Hartley’s Aryanism: Eugenics in aFinnish‐Yankee Sauna,” in American Art (Smithsonian Institution) in 2008 and the essay “Reconsidering ‘The Soil’: The Stieglitz Circle, Regionalism, and Cultural Eugenics in the 1920s,” in the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties in 2011. Both of these publications were recognized with awards from the Association of Art Museum Curators.

Valerie Hillings, PhD, is Curator and Manager, Curatorial Affairs, Abu Dhabi Project, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. She leads the curatorial team responsible for building a collection of art made around the world since the 1960s and developing exhibitions and programming for the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Since 2004, she has curated and co-curated exhibitions throughout the Guggenheim’s constellation of museums, among them Russia!; Hanne Darboven's Hommage à Picasso; Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s, and most recently ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s. In addition, she has organized major presentations of works from the Guggenheim Museum’s collection for venues in Abu Dhabi, Australia, and Germany.

Hillings earned her BA in art history from Duke University and her MA and PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Theresa Papanikolas, Ph.D. joined the Seattle Art Museum in 2019 as its Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art. Prior to that, she was Deputy Director of Art and Programs and Curator of European and American Art at the Honolulu Museum of Art, where she led an innovative reinstallation of its holdings in European and American art and organized the exhibitions From Whistler to Warhol: Modernism on Paper (2010), Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawaiʻi Pictures (2013), Art Deco Hawaiʻi (2014), and Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West (2017). Through these projects and others she helped position the museum as the cultural hub of one of the country’s most diverse metropolitan areas. She is also the curator of the New York Botanicals 2018 garden-wide summer show, Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawaii.

From 2006 to 2008, Dr. Papanikolas was Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she organized Doctrinal Nourishment: Art and Anarchism in the Time of James Ensor (2008) and helped plan Drawing Surrealism (2012). She has also held positions at Rice University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. She has expertise in 19th- and 20th-century American art, and has published widely on Dada and Surrealism. She holds degrees in Art History from University of the Southern California (BA) and the University of Delaware (MA, Ph.D.), and has completed a Fellowship at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (2016).

Daniel Schulman is Director of Visual Art for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, where he leads the city’s public art and exhibitions programs. He has worked at The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was assistant and associate curator of modern and contemporary art from 1993 to 2004.

A specialist in African American art, Schulman curated and organized several major exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and contributed actively to the museum’s acquisitions program. Most recently, he curated A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund (Spertus Museum, Chicago, 2009) and Richard Hunt: Sixty Years of Sculpture (Chicago Cultural Center, 2014). He is currently working on an exhibition devoted to the history of African American designers in Chicago. Schulman was educated at Columbia University in New York (BA 1982) and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (MA 1986).

Reto Thüring is Chair of Modern, Contemporary, and Decorative Art, and Performing Arts and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he is responsible for overseeing the museum’s collection of contemporary artwork and the programming of exhibitions at the museum and the Transformer Station. He studied at the University of Basel and wrote his dissertation on Venetian portraiture of the 16th century. Since 2004, Thüring’s primary focus has been working with contemporary art and artists as a curator, editor, and art critic. Projects at the Cleveland Museum of Art include installations and solo exhibitions with Albert Oehlen, Kara Walker, Dan Graham, Roman Signer, Martin Creed, Jennifer Bartlett, Fred Wilson, Janet Cardiff, Ai Weiwei, Damián Ortega, Ragnar Kjartansson, and the group show The Unicorn.