At any given time, our community comprises about 50 people, including professors, fellows, research associates, interns, and staff in Washington as well as fellows conducting research around the world. Our board of advisors—scholars across art history and its related fields on term appointments—meets annually to discuss the Center’s policies and programs. The board along with other appointees in our selection committees also review our fellowship applications.
The Center, May 2024
Staff
Deans
Steven Nelson, Dean
Peter M. Lukehart, Associate Dean for Fellowships and Fellows Programs
Kaira M. Cabañas, Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Publications
Administration
Sarah Bohannan, Center Administrator (from September 2023)
Helen Tangires, Center Administrator (to October 2023)
Nathalie Meza, Assistant Administrator for Budget and Accounting
Programs
Sarah Battle, Associate Projects Manager, Academic Programs and Publications
Gary Calcagno, Assistant Projects Manager, Academic Programs and Publications
Thomas Edwards, Fellowship Officer
Elise Ferone, Center Support Specialist
Emily Koller-Apelskog, Fellows Program Coordinator (to September 2023)
Jen Rokoski, Communications Officer
Matthew J. Westerby, Digital Research Officer
Olivia Yardley, Fellows Program Coordinator (from January 2024)
Research
Angélica Becerra, Postdoctoral Research Associate (to August 2023)
Gloria de Liberali, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Molly Superfine, Postdoctoral Research Associate (from October 2023)
Fulvia Zaninelli, Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate
Professors & Lecturers
Nancy J. Troy, Stanford University
Kress-Beinecke Professor, 2023–2024
Adriana Zavala, Tufts University
Andrew W. Mellon Professor, 2022–2024
Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University
Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, spring 2024
Anna Deavere Smith, Writer/Actress
73rd A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts, spring 2024
Adriana Zavala
Senior Fellows
Brian D. Goldstein, Swarthmore College
Paul Mellon Senior Fellow, 2023–2024
If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond Jr.
Robb Hernández, Fordham University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, 2023–2024
Transplanetary: Speculative Arts of the Americas
Pamela Lee, Yale University
William C. Seitz Senior Fellow, 2023–2024
The Art of Small War
Walter Simon Melion, Emory University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, 2023–2024
Praying through Prints: Technologies of Affective Piety and Image-Based Devotion in Dutch and Flemish Prayer Books, 1480–1680
Kathryn Blair Moore, University of Connecticut
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, 2023–2024
The Other Space of the Arabesque: Italian Renaissance Art at the Limits of Representation
Alla Vronskaya, Universität Kassel
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, 2023–2024
Environmental Colonization: Architecture, Climate, and Geography in the Cold War Soviet Union
Nancy J. Troy, Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen, Aleksander Musiał, Benjamin O. Murphy, Christopher Daly, Gloria de Liberali, Maria Gabriella Matarazzo, Erin Dickey, Bianca Hand, Fulvia Zaninelli, and Justin M. Brown with Dumbarton Oaks fellow Walid Akef, on a visit to Dumbarton Oaks, November 2023
Visiting Senior Fellows
Adeyemi Akande, University of Lagos
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, June–August 2023
Dimensionality and Replacement: Photographs as Surrogates in West African Cultures and Religion
Alejandro Anreus, William Paterson University
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, September–October 2023
Dictatorships, Exile, and Recovery: Caribbean Artists, 1960–1980; Trujillo, Duvalier, and Castro Dictatorships and the Narrative of 11 Contemporary Artists
Courtney R. Baker, University of California, Riverside
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, November–December 2023
Cinematic Slavery and Its Fine Arts Precedents
George Baker, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, March–May 2024
Paul Thek and the Italian South: From Pop to the Popular, from Process to Procession
Angela Cerasuolo, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, September–October 2023
“Avvertimenti de’ quali non fa bisogno ragionare”: Pigments and Mixtures in Literary Sources of the 16th Century, between Recipe Books and Art Theory
Mohamed Elshahed, Mexico City
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, June–August 2023
A History of Egypt in 100 Objects
Sarah Elizabeth Fraser, Heidelberg University
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, March–April 2024
The Role of Tibetan Artists in Forging the Modern in Chinese Art: Alterity in Buddhist Pictorial Praxis
Margaret L. Laird, Wilmington, DE
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, January–February 2024
Drawing Beasts: Narrativity and the Ancient Roman Imagination
Gregory Sholette, Queens College, City University of New York
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, June–August 2023
Backstories of Art and Activism
Petra Trnkova, Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, September–October 2023
Copy Relations: The Mechanical Reproduction of Art in the Mid-19th Century
Tomáš Valeš, Masarykova Univerzita
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, June–August 2023
Human Bodies, Gender, Race, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Late 18th-Century Vienna
James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, January–February 2024
Shell Oil and the Political Confrontation of the Arts
Alejandro Anreus leads a gallery talk, October 2023
Visiting Guest Artist
Dario Robleto, Houston, TX
Visiting Guest Artist, March–April 2024
Until We Are Forged: Hymns for the Elements
Ailsa Mellon Bruce National Gallery of Art Sabbatical Fellows
Danielle Hahn, National Gallery of Art, Department of Music Programs, 2023–2024
We Gather Together: The Role of Music Festivals in Healing and Rebuilding Communities following Periods of War, Pandemic, Famine, Displacement, and Other Epic Disasters
James Meyer, National Gallery of Art, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2023–2024
What Happened to the Institutional Critique?
Andrea Nelson, National Gallery of Art, Department of Photographs, 2023–2024
Reading Modern Photobooks
Susan B. Wertheim, National Gallery of Art, Office of Architecture and Engineering, 2023–2024
Contemplating Contemplative Spaces: The Power of Abstraction in Modern Architecture
Susan B. Wertheim leads a talk about the architecture of the East Building, February 2024
Postdoctoral Fellows
In Residence
Maria Gabriella Matarazzo
Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellow, 2023–2025
Beyond “Buon Fresco”: Experimenting with Oil in Wall Painting, c. 1500–1700
Benjamin O. Murphy, Case Western Reserve University
A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022–2024
Second-Order Images: Reflexive Strategies in Early Latin American Video Art
Not in Residence
Anni Pullagura, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Center/YCBA Postdoctoral Fellow, 2023–2024
Forms of Feeling: Collecting the Nation for Contemporary Cultural Institutions
Predoctoral Fellows
In Residence
Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen, Johns Hopkins University
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2022–2024
Untitled: Nasreen Mohamedi, Geeta Kapur, and Abstraction in Internationalist India, 1950–2016
Justin M. Brown, Yale University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2022–2024
Afro-Surinamese Calabash Art in the Era of Slavery and Emancipation
Christopher Daly, Johns Hopkins University
David E. Finley Fellow, 2021–2024
Painting in Lucca in the Late 15th Century: A Problem in Artistic Geography
Erin Dickey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2022–2024
“Bad Information”: Networks, Knowledges, and Feminist Art in the 1980s
Bianca Hand, Johns Hopkins University
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2022–2024
What Is Assyria without the Other: The Subversive Role of Alterity in the Reliefs and Architecture of Sargon II’s Royal Palace at Khorsabad
Aleksander Musiał, Princeton University
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2021–2024
Immersion: Classical Reception and Eastern European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, c. 1600–1830
Kelvin Parnell Jr., University of Virginia
Wyeth Fellow, 2022–2024
Casting Bronze, Recasting Race: American Sculpture and the Bronze Economy (1840–1890)
Kelvin Parnell Jr., Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen, Christopher Daly, Bianca Hand, Nancy J. Troy, Erin Dickey, Justin M. Brown, and Aleksander Musiał on the Center's farewell boat tour, May 2024
Not in Residence
David P. Bardeen, University of California, Los Angeles
David E. Finley Fellow, 2022–2025
Arboreal Formations: The Dynamics of Wood in Italian Intarsia and Painting, 1450–1525
Robyn A. Barrow, University of Pennsylvania
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2022–2025
Tracking North: Art, Ecology, and Exchange in the Medieval Nordic World
Chasitie Brown, The University of Texas at Austin
Twelve-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2023–2024
The Dormant Scar: Exhibiting Race in the Queloides Exhibition Series in Cuba, the United States, and Spain (1997–2012)
Rowanne Dean, University of Chicago
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2023–2026
Valuing Virtuosity: Goldsmiths’ Work in Northwestern Europe, c. 1350–1500
Ryan Eisenman, University of Pennsylvania
David E. Finley Fellow, 2023–2026
The Limoges Champlevé Enamel Industry, c. 1180–1280
William Green, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2023–2024
Looking Back/Looking Ahead: Alternative and Antiquated Process Photography in North America, c. 1970
Hannah Kaemmer, Harvard University
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow, 2023–2024
Expertise and Empire: Fortification Building and the English Ordnance Office, 1660–1714
Chaeri Lee, Indiana University
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2023–2025
Āthār: Visualizing Vestiges of Time in Late 19th-Century Iran
James H. Miller, Princeton University
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2023–2025
Fossils for a Future Time: David Smith and the Sculpting of Traces
Celia Rodríguez Tejuca, Johns Hopkins University
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2023–2025
From the Ground Up: Picturing Scientific Knowledge in the Late 18th-Century Spanish Americas
Julia Silverman, Harvard University
Wyeth Fellow, 2023–2025
Unmaking Tradition: Native Designers and the Representation of Knowledge during the “Indian New Deal”
Wenjie Su, Princeton University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2023–2025
Simulating Time: Cosmological Analogies, Cross-Cultural Similes, and the Transmission of Clockwork Objects between Early Modern Europe and China
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowships for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad
Kale Doyen, University of Pittsburgh, 2023–2024
Julia Hamer-Light, University of Delaware, 2023–2024
Emily Kang, University of California, Berkeley, 2023–2024
Joseph Mizhakii Zordan, Harvard University, 2023–2024
Curator of contemporary art Molly Donovan gives a tour of The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans to the Center, December 2023
Howard University Undergraduate Interns
Keauna Brantley, 2022–2024
Jada Brooks, 2023–2025
Clay Cauley, 2023–2025
Amaya Charley, 2022–2024
Aletheia Couts, 2023–2025
Dana Goodridge, 2022–2024
Aneesah Lawrence, 2023
Kennedy Martin, 2022–2024
Sacha Reid, 2022–2024
Miles Kenyan Stewart, 2023–2025
Munyang Tengen, 2022–2024
Elroi Yonatan, 2023–2025
Elroi Yonatan, Aneesah Lawrence, Miles Kenyan Stewart, Aletheia Couts, Clay Cauley, and Jada Brooks, September 2023
Board of Advisors
Marisa Bass, Yale University
September 2022–August 2025
Valerie Cassel Oliver, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
September 2022–August 2025
Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University
September 2023–August 2026
Rachel Haidu, University of Rochester
September 2023–August 2026
Byron Ellsworth Hamann, Rome
September 2022–August 2025
Nathaniel B. Jones, Washington University in St. Louis
September 2023–August 2026
Joan Kee, University of Michigan
September 2021–August 2024
Postdoctoral Fellowships Selection Committee
David Young Kim, University of Pennsylvania
November 2020–February 2024
Jean Ma, University of Hong Kong
November 2023–February 2027
Laura E. Pérez, University of California, Berkeley
November 2020–February 2024
Curatorial Liaison
Franklin Kelly, Christiane Ellis Valone Curator of American Paintings, National Gallery of Art
September 2021–August 2024