Many, many thanks to all of our alumni who sent in updates for this semester’s “Alumni News” blogpost. Hearty and heartfelt congratulations on all of your achievements, activities, and milestones. We hope to hear from more of you for our next “Alumni News” round-up, which we’ll post sometime in fall 2024. Great thanks as always go to departmental faculty Jon Ritter, Mosette Broderick, Carol Krinsky, and Dennis Geronimus for their contributions; to our Administrative Aide Clara Reed for sending out the call; and to our Manager Peggy Coon for publishing this blogpost.
Johannes Nathan (B.A. Art History ‘87; M.A. Courtauld Institute of Art, Ph.D. Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, ‘95) published a letter in the May 2023 number of the Burlington Magazine outlining the need for aid to Ukraine’s cultural institutions, an issue on which he has been working actively. Johannes lives with his wife Antoinette in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. An art dealer, his firm Nathan Fine Arts has offices in Potsdam and Zurich.
Kathryn Gettles-Atwa (B.A. Art History ‘94; M.A. Art History, Institute of Fine Arts ‘97) is Counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. She is now participating in Pelham Community Rowing Association’s Master’s Program. “In February I participated in the St. Valentine’s Day Indoor Regatta and placed second in my age group,” reports Kathryn.
Beth Citron (B.A. Art History ‘02; Ph.D. History of Art, University of Pennsylvania ‘09) began a new role as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Asian and Asian Diaspora Art at Asia Society on March 18. “This will complement my ongoing role as Consulting Editor of STIRworld and ongoing curatorial projects,” reports Beth. As the announcement on the Asia Society’s website notes, Beth will work closely with the director of the Asia Society “to plan and implement…[the] Museum’s modern and contemporary art exhibitions, as well as build the Museum’s contemporary art collection, initiated in 2003”; further information here.
In February of this year Julia Perratore (B.A. Art History ‘03; Ph.D. History of Art, University of Pennsylvania ‘12), who is Assistant Curator of Medieval Art at The Met Cloisters, delivered a lecture titled “Cloister in the Wilderness: Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert” in the Robert Branner Forum for Medieval Art, a lecture series sponsored by Columbia University’s Department of Art History & Archaeology.
Christian J. Zaino, M.D. (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘06; MED ‘10) and his wife Joanna Rose welcomed Tommaso Paul into the world on January 19, 2024. Tommaso was born at Morristown Medical Center weighing 7 lbs and 8 oz and measuring 21 inches.
Baby’s first name was a selection by his parents whereas his middle name is to honor his late maternal uncle, Paul Genco. He shares a birthday with his maternal great grandfather, Giuseppe Genco. Mom and baby are well. Dad is very proud. Older brother Alessio is thrilled.
Larisa Grollemond (B.A. Art History ‘07; Ph.D. History of Art, University of Pennsylvania ‘16), Assistant Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Getty Museum, has curated two recent exhibitions: Graphic Design in the Middle Ages in collaboration with 2022-2023 Graduate Intern Sam Truman, and most recently, Blood: Medieval/Modern, which juxtaposes medieval manuscript illumination with work by modern and contemporary artists.
Katelin Kutchko (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies, Studio Art minor ‘10) writes, “I have some fun news to share! I recently got engaged to my fiancé Andrew Gleason. He proposed at the TWA hotel, my favorite place in the city. I first learned about Eero Saarinen and the TWA Flight Center back in my “Modern Architecture” class at NYU with Professor Carol Krinsky. I have always loved the building and am so happy it has been preserved and redeveloped into the TWA hotel since my time at NYU!”
Quemuel Arroyo (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘12; M.P.A. Wagner ‘20) has been recognized with a New York State legislative resolution for contributions to New Yorkers as a Dominican-American advocate for the disability community. The honor was bestowed by State Senator Luis R. Sepúlveda to help mark the 180th anniversary of the independence of the Dominican Republic, February 29. Arroyo will personally deliver a New York State Senate resolution of friendship and cooperation to the Dominican Senate. Further information here.
Arroyo also been named a young alumni trustee of NYU.
Riad Kherdeen (B.A. Art History, Chemistry minor ‘13; M.A. Institute of Fine Arts ‘16; Ph.D. candidate History of Art, University of California, Berkeley) sends this news: “I’m overjoyed to report that I have landed the Bridge to the Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate position in the Art History Department at the University of Illinois Chicago. I will be starting there in the fall. This also means that I am wrapping up my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and graduating next month. My dissertation, titled “Spectral Modernisms: Decolonial Aesthetics and Haunting in the Aftershock of Morocco’s Agadir Earthquake (1960),” has been advised by Professor Anneka Lenssen; Professors Julia Bryan-Wilson, Sugata Ray, and Stefania Pandolfo have served on dissertation committee. My yearlong fellowship at the Met ends in August, and then I will ship out to Chicago, fifteen years after I first stepped foot in the Department of Art History at NYU in fall of 2009 as a first-year undergraduate student and declared my Art History major. Little did I know then, as a pre-med student at the time, that I would eventually become a social art historian.”
Louise Lui (B.A. Art History, Business Studies minor ‘15; M.A. Bard Graduate Center, New York ‘23) is Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) in Singapore. Her first exhibition, Fukusa: Japanese Gift Covers from the Chris Hall Collection, will open at Peranakan Museum, a sister institution of ACM. It runs from 19 April to 25 August.
Christina Cacouris (B.A. Art History/Journalism ‘17) launched a filmed interview series at Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio focusing on photography; her episode with curator William A. Ewing on luminary artist and photographer Edward Steichen went live this month.
Christina Cacouris In Conversation on Deborah Turbeville
Alice Centamore(B.A. Art History ‘18) has been accepted to the Ph.D. program in Art History at the University of Chicago.
Yue Wu (B.A. Art History ‘18) will pursue a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and Culture at Stanford University beginning in Fall 2024. Yue earned an M.A. in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard University in 2023; her M.A. thesis has been nominated for the Fletcher Award for Outstanding Thesis. Her research projects delve into the global 1960s, avant-garde movements, revolutions, arts and activism, and the intricate social and cultural fabric shaping aesthetics.
Yue has also been active in the art world as an independent curator and writer. She curated the exhibition “A Spring Breeze” in 2023 and realized the digital exhibition “Guerrillas in Flatland: Unite! Digital Voyagers” in 2021 at China’s largest public contemporary art museum, Power Station of Art Shanghai. The latter showcases art in a unique online environment, subverting familiar digital interfaces; with that exhibition, she was recognized for the nationwide Emerging Curator Award in China. Yue was selected for digital residency at Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council in 2022. In 2019 she coordinated the first overseas retrospective “Xu Bing: Thought and Method” at Museum MACAN, the first Museum in Indonesia to have a collection of modern and contemporary art. After graduate school she worked as Associate Director at Green Bus Gallery founded by Richard Lovett in Santa Monica, CA, before the gallery’s sudden closure.
Yue currently manages a community initiative called Point Space for Asian artists, scholars, and entrepreneurs in Los Angeles. For more details on Yue’s curatorial and creative projects, please visit her website.
Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez (B.A. Art History ‘18), who is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Stanford University,sends this news: “A few weeks ago I received a 2024-2025 Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. I will use my year in Washington to complete my dissertation, which is tentatively titled The Disappearance of Landscape: Artists on Fire Island, 1937-1983.”
Wayne Chen (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘19) has been accepted to the M.Arch. Program in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; he will begin his studies this fall.
Rebecca Coffman (M.A. Historical and Sustainable Architecture ‘19) published an article titled “59 Brick Lane: A History of Adaptive Reuse,” in volume 12 of the journal Architecture and Culture, which appeared in January 2024. Rebecca was a winner of a 2023 Lindsay Jones Memorial Research Fund Award.
Emily Conklin(B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘20; M.S. Historic Preservation, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation ‘23) has been named to the Best of Practice jury sponsored by The Architects’ Newspaper, a widely-read journal of which she is the Managing Editor. She will serve on the jury with prominent architects and planners. Emily’s current areas of research interest include “the architectures of labor and the urban commons.”
Gabriella (Gabby) Chinea (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies; Spanish minor ‘21) sends this news: “I am very excited to start working toward a Masters of Urban Planning at Hunter College this fall! I’m looking forward to expanding on my coursework from undergrad and learning more about housing, transportation, and sustainability. I will pursue the degree part-time as I continue to work in the field and sit on the board of the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, the steward of thirty-seven community gardens in New York City.”
Gianni Grieco (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘21) has been accepted to the M.Arch. Program at SUNY Buffalo; he will begin his studies this fall.
Joe Tuano (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies/German, ‘21) reports, “I have been accepted into the Masters of Urban Planning Program at NYU Wagner for Fall 2024, and I’d like to give a special shout-out to Professor Mosette Broderick for helping with my application.”
Anushka Maqbool (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’21) has been accepted to the Masters Program in City Planning in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Miranda Gibson (B.A. Art History ‘22) has been accepted to NYU Law School and will begin her studies this coming fall.
Honglu Jiang (M.A. Historical and Sustainable Architecture ’22) will begin the M.A. Program in Art History at the University of Warwick (UK) this fall.
Nicole Bitanga (B.A. Art History ‘23) has been accepted to the M.A. program in Arts Administration at Columbia University. Nicole also has been working with TEFAF as their Art Fair Operations Coordinator.
Risa Kimura (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’23) will begin the M.Arch. Program of the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Architecture this fall.
Yutong Li (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’23) will begin the Masters in Urban Planning Program at the University of California, Berkeley this fall.
Leonard Zhu (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’23) published “China’s Ghost Cities” in Ink and Image 15 (2023), the journal of undergraduate research of NYU’s Department of Art History/Program for Urban Design & Architecture Studies.
Please join us for the first Robert Branner Forum event of 2024 on Thursday, February 29th at 6:00 PM, featuring Julia Perratore. Dr. Perratore’s lecture, “
Cloister in the Wilderness: Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert,” will take place in-person in Schermerhorn Hall, room 807.
Following the lecture, attendees are invited to a reception in the Stronach Center in Schermerhorn Hall.
The construction of the cloister of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert (12th-13th centuries) corresponds to a period during which the monastic community reflected on the life and deeds of their founder. Saint Guilhem was a Carolingian warrior who, at the end of his life, left behind worldly concerns to found and join a monastery in a remote, wild gorge at the edge of the French Massif Central. The hagiography that the twelfth-century monks wrote, as well as the chansons de geste starring Guilhem that they knew and borrowed from, celebrate a particular aspect of the monastery’s foundation: the choice of a “desert” (or wilderness) location. This presentation explores the primacy of the desert in textual accounts of Saint-Guilhem’s foundation with respect to the imagery depicted in the cloister decoration, which abounds with all that grows from the ground: trunks, branches, leaves, vines, flowers, fruit, and even streams of water. As methodically composed as the plantings of a formal garden, the cloister sculptures appear, at first glance, to work counter to the monks’ careful positioning of their house within the desert—a wild place conceptually opposed to the deliberate, human-generated space of the garden.
We received a tremendous response to our call for alumni news this fall! Greatest thanks to all of our alumni who sent in updates. Hearty and heartfelt congratulations on all of your achievements, activities, and milestones. We hope that you and yours remain well, and we hope to hear from more of you for our next “Alumni News” round-up, which we’ll post sometime in spring 2024. Great thanks as always go to departmental faculty Mosette Broderick, Dennis Geronimus, Carol Krinsky, and Jon Ritter for their contributions; to our Administrative Aide Clara Reed for sending out the call; and to our Manager Peggy Coon for assistance publishing this blogpost.
Phil Tajitsu Nash (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘78; Rutgers School of Law—Newark) curated an exhibit at the Chinese American Museum in Washington, DC focusing on the late Corky Lee, a photographer and community activist who preserved Asian American community history while encouraging activism, pride and respect for human rights. “My NYU training came in handy in choosing photos, cropping them, making sure dates were available, and making sure that the pictures were appropriately contextualized,” Phil adds, “The exhibit showcases Corky’s photos while also centering reactions to the photos from people representing a broad range of ages, professions, geographic locations, Asian ancestries and more. Corky’s camera and postcards inviting you to his exhibit openings in the pre-email era take you back to his analog photo days. Photos he took of a 1974 Asian American community street fair here in DC remind you of the synergies between the NY and DC communities as we built the Asian American Movement in those early days. A wall is devoted to post-it notes that visitors can leave as they visit the show; thank you’s to Corky won’t be read by him anymore, but they are extremely moving to those of us who still look to him for inspiration that a better world is being built, one day at a time.”
The Corky Lee website contains details about a book of his photos coming out soon.
Nina Wishnok (B.A. Art History ‘89; M.A. Graphic Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design ’95) reports that her new three-dimensional series, Dwellings, is a part of the upcoming show “Plenty” at 13Forest Gallery in Arlington, MA. “And I’m excited to have received a month-long Artist Residency next fall at the Scuola Internazionale in Venice” adds Nina.
Nicholas Sawicki (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘96; Ph.D. History of Art, University of Pennsylvania ‘07) is editor of a new volume on the artist Shimon Attie, Starstruck: An American Tale . Published by Black Dog Press in London and Lehigh University Art Galleries, it features contributions by Sawicki, William B. Crow, Hannah Klemm and Ed Simon. The book focuses on Attie’s project of the same title, which maps past and present in the historic steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, weaving together film and sculpture to explore people, place, and community, and the powerful social, political, and economic forces that shape them. Sawicki is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art, Architecture and Design at Lehigh University.
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim’s(B.A. Art History ‘98; Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts ‘06) new book, Male Bodies Unmade: Picturing Queer Selfhood , was published earlier this month by University of California Press. Jongwoo is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in Art History and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University. His first book, Painted Men in Britain, 1868–1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities, was published by Ashgate in 2012.
Tarek Ibrahim (B.A. Art History ‘00) sends this news: “I spent the last couple of years working towards the opening of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which due to the pandemic was finished a year late, at the end of 2022. I was project manager for a new Japanese tea house for a Japan module, designed by the Kanazawa-based team of Jun Ura Architects. I also managed a number of other new projects for the Ethnologcal Museum, including the installation of works by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas and Mariana Deball. I’m particularly proud of the multisensory/touch stations that I designed with various curators and my colleague Friedrun Portele-Anyangbe. I am also teaching two classes at NYU Berlin, one on the collections of the Museum Island and Humboldt Forum, the other an architectural survey of Berlin. After publishing my first book in 2019 with the German Archaeological Institute, I’m now making big headway on my dissertation (better too late than never!), which I hope to have finished in about a year and a half.”
Michele F. Saliola (B.A. Art History, Studio Art minor ‘01; M.A. Institute of Fine Arts ‘03) has joined the staff of the National Trust for Historic Preservation as Senior Director of Philanthropy. She has also been appointed to the Board of the Fanwood Memorial Library Foundation, which is nearing completion on a new facility for a 70-year old public resource in Union County, NJ, and serves on the Preserve Shady Rest Committee, a nonprofit dedicated to preservation and public access for Shady Rest Golf & Country Club (est. 1921), the nation’s first Black-owned country club which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.
Michele has led donor engagement in the arts and culture and preservation sectors for over 20 years. A lifelong advocate for local history, Michele has been involved with many notable preservation projects in the New York-New Jersey area. Most recently, Michele was Senior Director of Philanthropy & Grant Management at The Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey’s largest art and science museum and steward to The Ballantine House, home of the Newark beer-brewing family built in 1885, which has just completed an award-winning restoration to tell a more inclusive story of the people who lived and worked there. Prior to that, she was Director of Institutional Advancement at Judd Foundation, New York/Marfa, where she contributed to the restoration and opening of 101 Spring Street, a five-story cast-iron building in SoHo where artist Donald Judd first developed the concept of permanent installation and part of the Trust’s Historic Artists’ Homes & Studios (HAHS) program.
Beth Citron (B.A. Art History ‘02; Ph.D. Art History, University of Pennsylvania ‘09) sends this news: “I’m pleased to report that the free course I authored on modern and contemporary Indian art for MAP Academy recently was launched. I hope some in the NYU community may be interested in engaging! I’ve also recently joined STIR as Consulting Arts Editor, and work with Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi on global museum relations. While most of my work is in India, I continue to live in the East Village with my now 4-year-old son.”
Jacob Fry (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies/Mathematics ‘04; M. Arch University of Pennsylvania, ‘09) currently oversees transportation, sustainability, and resiliency programs at the World Trade Center Department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He is a licensed architect with many built transportation projects in the New York Metropolitan area, and is enjoying an ongoing home renovation in his free time.
Christina Lau (B.A. Art History/French Literature ‘05) completed the book design, original illustrations, and print production of a 240-page book on real estate investing. This is her second book design, following a proposal for an alphabet book, A is for Apocalypse, which was a finalist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Met150 Design Contest. She continues to pursue freelance graphic design projects, including art exhibition materials and stationery projects, and recently launched her portfolio.
Mary Munroe, née Mulholland (B.A. Art History, Urban Design and Architecture Studies, Metropolitan Studies, and Irish Studies minors ‘05) was recently promoted to the position of State Operating Budget Coordinator at the House of Representatives in Washington state, where she previously served as a fiscal analyst for over a decade. While the field of public budgeting and finance may seem far afield from her Art History major, Mary credits her studies at NYU with helping her develop an excellent eye for detail as well as written and oral communication skills. Mary also recently married her longtime partner Scott, a pilot at Delta airlines.
Jonathan Tiu (B.A. Art History/Computer Science, Studio Art minor ‘06; M.D. Tulane University School of Medicine ‘15) has concluded three years on faculty as a neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine. He is grateful to have received the Oksana Volshteyn Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence in 2021. In January 2024, he is returning to the Northeast to join the Department of Neurology at Hackensack University Medical Center. There, he will continue specializing in neurorehabilitation, especially restorative interventions for cognitive and motor impairments after neurologic injury.
Maeve O’Donnell-Morales (B.A. Art History, Studio Art minor ‘07; M.A. Art History, City University of New York, Art History ‘12; Ph.D. Courtauld Institute of Art ‘18) reports: “Last year, an exhibition I curated opened at the Getty Museum. The topic of the small exhibition was the role of artists in the creation and legacy of Marian images. This year I published an article entitled “Encountering the Medieval Altar: A Set of Seventeen Chapel Inventories from Burgos Cathedral (1369)” in Viator. Next year, my colleagues and I will complete a book on the medieval monastery of San Millan de la Cogolla (La Rioja) and I will finish revisions on another article on Marian images in medieval Spain to be published in Gesta. This year we also welcomed our second child, a little boy named Dylan who was born in May of this year (big sister Yvonne was born in 2020).”
Perrin Lathrop (B.A. Art History, Business Studies minor ‘09) joined the Princeton University Art Museum as the inaugural assistant curator of African art in August 2022. She earned her PhD in Art History from Princeton in 2021. Perrin co-curated the touring exhibition African Modernism in America, 1947–67 with Jamaal Sheats and Nikoo Paydar of Fisk University Galleries. The exhibition is open at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC until January 7 and is co-organized with the American Federation of Arts. Their exhibition publication African Modernism in America, published by the American Federation of Arts in 2022 and distributed by Yale University Press, was honored with a Curatorial Award for Excellence by the Association of Art Museum Curators in 2023.
Areyeh “Ari” Lipkis (B.A. Art History ‘11; M.A. Courtauld Institute of Art ‘16) is currently a Ph.D. student at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University. “I specialize in Italian architectural works on paper from the 16th and 17th centuries,” Ari reports. “I recently passed my qualifying exams and am currently finishing my dissertation proposal. In October, I delivered a paper at SECAC in Richmond, VS, ‘Transforming Brick into Stone: Giulio Romano’s Use of Fictive Materials in the Palazzo del Te.’ I am the most recent recipient of the Tyler School of Art & Architecture’s Rome Fellowship and will be departing mid-January to begin five months of research in Northern and Central Italy.”
Kaylee Alexander (B.A. Art History, French and Religious Studies minors ‘13; M.A. Institute of Fine Arts ‘15; Ph.D. Art History, Duke University, ‘21) has been appointed Research Data Librarian at the University of Utah, where she was previously the ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow for Digital Matters. In August, her first monograph, A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris, 1804–1924, was published with Routledge’s Research in Art History series. Kaylee also currently serves on the board of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and is treasurer and blog editor for the Collective for Radical Death Studies.
Here is a synopsis of Kaylee’s book: “Based on my dissertation, A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris, 1804–1924 takes a novel, data-driven approach to the cemeteries of Paris, analyzing a largely text-based body of archival material as proxy evidence for visual material that has been lost due to systematic, and legally sanctioned, acts of erasure. The book represents the first full-length study of vernacular monuments in France and the entrepreneurs who made them. It also provides methodical considerations at the intersection of the computational and digital humanities for managing survival biases in extant historical evidence that are applicable beyond the thematic focus of this book. Since extant examples of these more inconspicuous monuments are rare, this project employs both distant and close viewing—analyzing commercial almanacs, work logs, and burial records in aggregates alongside detailed case studies—to compensate for gaps in the material record. It will be of interest to scholars working in visual culture, popular culture, digital humanities, and French history.”
Riad Kherdeen (B.A. Art History, Chemistry minor ‘13; M.A. Institute of Fine Arts ‘16; Ph.D. candidate History of Art, University of California, Berkeley) was awarded the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2023–24 Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship. This year at the Met he is investigating “how specters of the 1960 Agadir earthquake and legacies of colonialism haunted decolonial aesthetic production in Morocco.”
Emily Young(B.A. Art History/ Urban Design and Architecture Studies, French minor ‘14) sends this news: “I am currently in my final year of the M. Arch program at Pratt Institute. This past summer, my research partner and I were awarded a small research travel grant (internally, at Pratt) to investigate urban interiority in Singapore, cataloguing the public/semi-public spaces built into the city’s megastructures during the 1960s and 1970s and speculating on how their spatial conditions may be replicated in today’s hyper-dense, high-rise residential developments for improved livability. Earlier this month, my past studio partner and I presented a project at an event titled Wast(ED): Working with Trash’ at the Center for Architecture. Tasked with designing a combined waste-to-energy facility with a nightclub along the Harlem River, we explored how hybridizing infrastructures of waste and pleasure could create a sense of industrial theatricality, capable of shifting our perceptions of these essential parts of urban life.”
Rachel J. Hong (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies/Mathematics ‘15) reports this news: “After graduating NYU with dual degrees in UDAS and Mathematics, I went on to obtain my Juris Doctor at Emory University School of Law. A special ‘thank you’ to Professors Jon Ritter and Stephen Raphael for being the inspiration to pursue my interest in urban planning and law.” Rachel is an attorney practicing Construction law. She advises and represents project owners, general contractors, and subcontractors through construction projects, litigation, and alternative dispute resolution. Rachel invites the NYU community to stay in touch.
Timothy Thomas III (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘15) earned his MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business in June. He began working at Temerity Strategic Partners, a real estate private equity firm focused providing growth capital to best in class real estate operators, in March 2023 as a Senior Associate focused on investments and capital raising. Temerity is always looking for great talent: feel free to reach out if interested in joining our team!
Karin Hostettler (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies, Studio Art/Italian Studies minors ‘16; M. Arch RISD ‘19) is a Designer at Dattner Architects, which she joined as an Entry Level Designer in 2019.
Daniela Mayer (B.A. Art History/Journalism ‘16) curated the exhibition Cosmic Shelter: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Private Cosmococasat the Leubsdorf Gallery at the Hunter College Art Galleries. Part of the global fiftieth anniversary celebration for the immersive installation series, Cosmic Shelter features the United States premiere of two unique Cosmococas and includes archival material to provide historical context for the layers of political commentary embedded in the subversive, psychedelic works. The exhibition and its free Programming-In-Progress series run from October 12, 2023–March 30, 2024 at the Leubsdorf Gallery (132 E. 68th St, New York, NY, 10065). The Hunter College Art Galleries are open Wednesday–Saturday from 12–6 PM.
Mayer works as an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College in the Art and Art History Department as well as an independent arts researcher and curator.
Ariel Bi (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘17) earned her Masters in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning from Harvard. She is now working as a city planner at the New York City Department of City Planning.
Emma P. Holter (B.A. Art History ‘17; M.A. Courtauld Institute of Art ‘22) sends this news: “In September, my review of The National Gallery of Art’s exhibition “Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” appeared in the journal Renaissance Studies. In addition, the exhibition I co-curated with Temple University professor Ashley West, “Printmaking | Worldmaking,” opened at the Berman Museum at Ursinus College. The show highlights a wide range of prints in the museum’s permanent collection—from Hendrik Goltzius to Francoise Gilot—and is on view through December 17, 2023. I co-organized the Tyler School of Art & Architecture’s First Graduate Art History Symposium, which took place on October 13–14th. This autumn I presented my research at an academic conference for the first time, the 2023 SECAC annual conference in Richmond, Virginia. My paper ‘Color Wars: Woad, Indigo, and the Emergence of Venetian Blue Paper,’ examined the advent of blue drawing paper in fifteenth-century Venice through an eco-critical lens, and explored the material’s entanglements with the local textile industry and the importation of foreign dyestuffs.” Emma is now in her second year in Temple University’s Ph.D. program in Art History.
Rex Wei (B.A. Gallatin/Art History ‘17) began working for OCBC Bank in Singapore in Marketing earlier this year. “Going forward, we will curate and stage art exhibitions in the bank’s art spaces and branches,” Rex writes.
Luming Guan (B.A. Art History ‘18; M.A. Art and Archaeology, Columbia University ‘21), who is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge, is back in New York. She was awarded the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2023–24 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Predoctoral Fellowship to pursue the advanced research and writing of her dissertation on the trickster as one of the key identities of German Renaissance artists.
Rachel Lim (B.A. Art History, Web Programming Minor ’18; M.P.S. NYU ITP ‘20) is currently the Lead Developer for the p5.js Web Editor, which is a free and open source online editor for p5.js—a JavaScript library with the goal of making coding accessible to artists, designers, educators, beginners, and all types of learners. She will also be a visiting assistant professor next semester at Pratt Institute for their Digital Accessibility course.
Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez (B.A. Art History, German and Medieval Studies minors ‘18), currently an advanced Ph.D. candidate at Stanford, was the research assistant for the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, which just opened at the Brooklyn Museum.
Tony Cui (B.A. Art History ‘19) is currently a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is writing a dissertation about the early modern Atlantic world. In the past year, he published “Guido Reni’s Compendio: Disegno, Colore, and the Ideal Union of Art,” an article on sixteen-century Italian art theory as represented in a painting by Guido Reni that appeared in volume 53 (2022) of the journal Comitatus. He also co-authored with Elizabeth Alice Honig and Jessica Stevenson Stewart a state-of-the-field article on the economic histories of Netherlandish art, published in volume 15, no. 2 (2023) of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. While living in Washington, DC and teaching as lecturer at UMD, Tony also serves as an assistant editor of Imago Mundi: International Journal of Cartography, a peer-reviewed “international, interdisciplinary and scholarly journal devoted to the historical interpretation of maps and mapmaking in any part of the world”
Sara Kim (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies/Metropolitan Studies ‘19) began her studies at The George Washington Law School in Washington DC earlier this fall. As Sara writes, “I’m sad to leave the best city in the world, but being from Maryland, I am excited and nervous for a familiar yet completely new experience! GW Law has a Property & Land Development study area as well as a Small Businesses & Community Economic Development clinic that will allow me to explore my urban planning passions during law school. DC itself is a rapidly growing city, so I am looking forward to spending three years there.”
(Charlotte) Yuyin Li (B.A. Art History, Italian Studies and Studio Art minors ‘19) sends this news: “I have graduated from the M.A./M.S. dual-degree program at the Garman Art Conservation Department of SUNY Buffalo State University. I am now working at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation as a Marshall Steel Post-Graduate Fellow in Archaeological Materials Conservation.”
Stephanie Tinsley (B.A. Art History ‘20) was awarded afellowship from the Carolee Schneemann Foundation in New York for summer, 2023.
Anaís Cezanné Caro (B.A. Art History/Global Liberal Studies, Concentration in Art, Text, and Media ‘22) is excited to share the news of the publishing of an abbreviated portion of their thesis, ‘Get Your Own Stuff’: The Colonial Canon and the Subversive Art of Appropriation” in The Interdependent’s fourth volume, “Reimagining Space and Communities.”
As the Curator and Director of Exhibitions at The National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture in Chicago, IL, Anaís has continued to wrestle with the very colonial canons discussed in this thesis, as seen in her curated exhibition, “Semillas: Artwork by Raul Ortiz Bonilla.” Ortiz Bonilla’s large-scale work breaks down an idealized version of Puerto Rico and offers a new perspective on the archipelago’s history with colonialism. The exhibition will close on November 22 after eleven months on view, and Anaís is excited to continue to develop this thesis and witness how BIPOC artists will continue to reimagine space and communities.
Xiaojing (Elizabeth) Guo (B.A. Art History ‘22) sends this news: “I’ve been working as the founder of Innerscape art tech society, where a group of passionate arts administrators focuses on organizing educational exhibitions, seminars, and performances in collaboration with esteemed external nonprofit organizations. We also forge strategic partnerships with galleries, museums, and other cultural institutions to facilitate effective communication and promote cultural diplomacy initiatives. Besides the art tech society events, I am also enjoying the field of opera and have participated in vocal competitions at Carnegie Hall.”
Eric Heidinger (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘22) began working for Adamson Associates in Vancouver earlier this year. Adamson were the executive architects behind the World Trade Master Plan, Canary Wharf, and Hearst Tower. As Eric reports, “They’ve hired me with the idea of jumping from department to department for the next year so that I can experience each aspect of the business. After that, I’ll be going to do my Master’s at University of British Columbia while working for them part-time, with the intention of returning full-time after I complete my degree.”
Isaac Martinez (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies/Politics ’22) began the M. Arch program in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) this fall.
Since graduating, Zoe Kaiser (B.A. Psychology, Art History minor ’22) has been working for Montblanc as a Marketing Manager. Most recently she oversaw the launch of the Masters of Art collection, dedicated to celebrating pioneering visual artists of our time. In honor of the first “Art Master” Vincent van Gogh she organized an exploration of his most notable works through the lens of colour psychology and his ability to convey emotion through his artistic technique. She is looking forward to continuing her exploration of the intersection between art and psychology. Those interested in viewing the webinar may find the link here.
Patrick Amsellem was a TA for Core courses and an adjunct professor in seminars in the early 21st century in the Department. He returned home to Sweden where he has just been appointed the Director General of the National Museum.
Heartfelt thanks to all of our alumni for writing in with so much wonderful news. Many congratulations on all of your achievements, activities, and milestones. We hope that you and your loved ones remain well and safe, and we hope to hear from more of you for our next “Alumni News” round-up, which we’ll post sometime in fall, 2023. Great thanks go to departmental faculty Mosette Broderick, Dennis Geronimus, Carol Krinsky, and Jon Ritter for their contributions to this blogpost; to our Administrative Aide Clara Reed—a Department of Art History alumna and M.A. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts—for sending out the call; and to our Manager Peggy Coon for assistance putting it together.
Gabriel P. Weisberg (B.A. Art History ‘63; Ph.D. Art History, Johns Hopkins University ‘67), Professor Emeritus University of Minnesota, in addition to teaching in the Art History Department at the University from 1985 until 2017, has organized many art exhibitions in various museums in the United States, in Japan, and in Europe, among them the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery in Helsinki, Finland. In France he was co-curator for the exhibition “Théodule Ribot. 1823-1891. Une Délicieuse Obscurité,” seen in three French Museums: Toulouse, Musée des Augustins, Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, in 2021-2022, published by Lienart, ISBN 978-2-35906-353-0; the last exhibition “Léon Bonvin Drawn to the Everyday, 1834-1866.” Catalogue raisonné, Maud Guichené and Gabriel P. Weisberg in Paris at the Fondation Custodia, 2022, ISBN 978-2-9583234-0-0 examined the career and work of the little-known draughtsman and watercolorist whose production is one of the treasures of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Catherine McNeur (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘03; M.A./M.Phil./Ph.D. History, Yale University ‘12) is publishing her second book, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science, with Basic Books this fall. The book uncovers the lives, work, and erasure of nineteenth-century Philadelphia entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris. Catherine is an Associate Professor of History at Portland State University in Oregon.
Bianca Holtier Coury (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘06) sends this news: “As the Manager of Continuing Education at Procore, Bianca is responsible for driving Procore.org’s on-demand education content strategy in concert with industry advancement and workforce development program pillars. Bianca is dedicated to enhancing the way the construction industry learns and reinvents itself by developing dynamic, engaging content focused on elevating learners to enrich their experiences in optimizing, upskilling and embracing digital tools to equip and empower their daily workflows—all in the spirit of preserving the humanized approach to shape and sustain learning and development. She has more than 15 years’ experience in construction project management roles serving residential and commercial verticals, procurement and urban planning, alongside a strong concentration in technology, business development and sustainable initiatives. Bianca has been featured in several publications and appeared as a guest on several construction podcasts and speaker panels, including ENR BuildTech.
“Bianca is incredibly grateful for the guidance and inspiration from Mosette Broderick, Isabelle Hyman, Jon Ritter and many of the brilliant, creative minds who shared their love of the built environment and imparted their wisdom during her undergraduate years spent in Washington Square Park. With Mosette Broderick’s uplifting energy, extensive knowledge and dedicated leadership, NYU Urban Design in London Summer 2005 holds some of Bianca’s most cherished memories. She currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband Matt and two children, Maya (5) and Bruno (4). Her heart grows fuller every day when her kiddos express sincere curiosity about art, buildings, cities, construction equipment, traffic patterns and the spaces where people live, work and play.
“To learn more how Procore’s construction technology is improving the lives of everyone in construction, visit www.procore.com. As Procore’s social impact arm, Procore.org is committed to advancing the construction industry through advocacy, education and technology. Discover the multi-faceted programs and partnerships by visiting www.procore.org. For a glimpse into Procore’s continuing education offering, check out www.education.procore.com/page/continuing-education.”
Sara Allain-Botsford (B.A. Art History ’09) is working for the British Museum as an Assistant Collections Manager, Storage and Moves, Large Objects. The project is to pack and move the objects in the museum’s storage facility in West London’s Hammersmith district to their newly built facility, British Museum Archaeological Research Collection (BM ARC), in Reading.
Daye Kim (B.A. Art History/Journalism ‘09) has opened her own art gallery named SALIIM PROJECTS in Newtown Square (PA), located just twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, which ran from February 20 through April 2, 2023 and which has been extended until April 20, is titled Ora et Labora, and features works by South Korea-born artists, Soukjin Park and Hayeong Kang. Meaning “prayer and labor,” Ora et Labora brings together two women artists and their work created over a period of a decade. Upon embarking on their journey into marriage and motherhood, both artists go on to spend the countless and nameless hours serving their young families at home. In a time that our culture today calls “leave,” the artists encounter exhaustion and fragility, but also find their artistic perspectives purified and their expressions refined. This exhibition celebrates each artist’s distinctive expressive language, attained through years of introspection and artistic endeavor. SALIIM PROJECTS, 3715 West Chester Pike, Newtown Square, PA 19073.
Malcolm St. Clair (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies/Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ‘09) and his wife, Lucy, welcomed two new members to their family, Agnes Gardner St. Clair and Faye Beverly St. Clair, on January 10, 2023. The girls were born at New York Presbyterian’s Alexandra Cohen Hospital and are both doing well. Malcolm also became the Head of History at St. Bernard’s School, where he has been teaching for ten years.
Alex Polson (B.A. Art History ‘10) sends this news: “I’m excited to share that I recently completed the project management for Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection. Thebook features 136 artists whose work is included in the Shah Garg Collection, a private art collection I’ve managed since 2014. It is co-edited by curators Katy Siegel and Mark Godfrey and published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., and it will be widely available on May 2nd. The Collection is helmed by Komal Shah, a philanthropist and collector based in California.”
Carolyn Keogh (B.A. Art History ‘12, M.A. Art History; M.A. CCNY Art History and Art Education ‘19) began work in 2020 as the Director of Education & Public Programs at The Olana Partnership, a non-profit organization whose mission is to inspire the public by preserving and interpreting Frederic Church’s OLANA. Last year, recent progress in diversifying interpretation, broadening accessibility, and expanding the stories told at Olana were highlighted in History News, the American Association of State and Local History’s quarterly publication. Carolyn’s article, “Out of One, Many: Frameworks for Making Diverse and Contemporary Connections at Olana” was published in the fall, 2022 issue, and covers projects and programs that Carolyn has developed to connect diverse audiences to Frederic Church’s artwork and home in Hudson, NY.
Irina Tchania (B.A. Art History ‘12; M.A. Psychology, NYU) will graduate from the CUNY Graduate Center this June, earning a Ph.D. in Psychology.
Kaylee Alexander (B.A. Art History; French/Religious Studies minors ‘13; M.A. History of Art & Architecture, IFA ‘15; Ph.D. Art History, Duke University, ‘21) is currently the Postdoctoral Fellow for the Digital Matters Lab at the University of Utah, supported by an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship. Her first monograph, A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris, 1804–1924, will be published in Routledge’s Research in Art History series this summer. Based on her doctoral dissertation, this book takes a novel, data-driven approach to the cemeteries of Paris, analyzing a largely text-based body of archival material as proxy evidence for visual material that has been lost due to systematic, and legally sanctioned acts of erasure.
Livia S. Huo (B.A. Art History, Business minor ‘14) sends this news: “Besides working as Senior Experience Design Lead at Standard Chartered Bank where I create customer journeys in digital banking for the global market, I am actively engaged in public programs at the Anhui Art Museum as a volunteer. We design programs that leverage multimedia, such as music and holography, to educate the public about western and Chinese artists. I have also completed a certificate degree in Chinese Paintings at the China Academy of Art (Hangzhou) in 2021.” Livia had this to say about how her education in art history benefitted her career: “The process of designing digital journeys, in some ways, is quite similar to curation. My research abilities helped shape my professional skills in ways that I didn’t expect. For me, the ability to find the perfect balance between exquisite details and a consistent outlook extended naturally from research into design.”
Anne LaGatta (B.A. Art History/Classics ‘16), a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Southern California, represented USC at the fifth annual Getty Graduate Symposium, held on February 3rd. The purpose of this symposium is to showcase the work of emerging art history scholars from PhD programs across California. You can watch her talk, entitled “Retrospection and Reanimation in Tiberian Imperian Portrait Statuary (14-37 CE),” along with a Q&A session.
Rex Wei (B.A. Art History ‘16) has begun working toward his Master’s degree in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Rebekah Coffman (M.A. Historical and Sustainable Architecture ‘19) recently began a new position with the Chicago History Museum as their Curator of Religion and Community History. As Rebekah reports, “It’s been a bit of a whirlwind transition between wrapping up my previous position, relocating, and jumping into the role, but I’m really enjoying the position. We have an absolutely incredible collection (including an impressive architecture collection), and the position lets me explore a lot of the themes I started with in my thesis.”
Sabina Vitale (B.A. Art History ‘19) sends this news: “After a wonderful sixteen months, I left my position as Executive Assistant to the Director at the Laguna Art Museum and will begin the Masters in Museum Studies program at the University of San Francisco in the fall of 2023. In the meantime, I am lucky to have the chance to travel. I have been weaving through Mexico for the last month, thoroughly enjoying the art, culture, and landscapes.”
Max Chavez (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘20), the first Director of Research and Special Projects at Preservation Chicago, sends this news: “Every year, my organization announces a list of the seven most endangered sites in this city. This year I successfully advocated for listing the Warehouse, a nightclub in the ‘70s and ‘80s that catered to a queer Black clientele and is commonly cited as the birthplace of house music, created there by DJ Frankie Knuckles.
“The modest building is in a hot real estate area, was recently purchased, and had no historic protections, so I was very concerned. The Warehouse made our list and the public outcry was massive. We created a petition that went absolutely viral, racking up over 13,000 signatures from across the globe in just a few weeks. I was also interviewed for a front page article in the Chicago Tribuneand dozens of other local, national, and international publications. It has truly been a huge, international sensation.
“Incredibly, the City of Chicago reacted almost immediately and worked with me to bring the Warehouse in front of our landmarks commission for consideration as an official landmark. They voted unanimously yesterday to advance the nomination to the next stage, so if all goes well, it should be a landmark by the end of the summer!”
Ella Senglaub (B.A. Art History/Social and Cultural Analysis, Medieval & Renaissance Studies minor ‘20) will present a talk titled “Museums’ Re-defining of the Italian Renaissance’s Eurocentric Narratives: Art and Exchange during the 14th and 15th Century” at the international conference Diachronic Artistic and Spatial Convergences and Divergences in the Mediterranean, to be held at the Acropolis Museum in Athens on April 27th–29th. The covers of full conference programs are included below.
Gabriella (Gabby) Chinea (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies, Spanish minor ‘21) sends this news: “I’m still working as a Project Coordinator at Central Park Conservancy, where we are currently working on constructing a new pool/rink in Harlem and renovating Conservatory Garden and the Chess and Checkers House. I recently earned a position on the board of the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, which cares for thirty-five community gardens in both boroughs. In my spare time and at work, I’m passionate about architecture photography. I started taking photos for Professor (Jon) Ritter’s class and now it’s my favorite hobby. Here is a link to my architecture instagram”
Emilie Meyer (B.A. Gallatin, with a concentration in Art History ‘22) started working part-time as operations manager at Cabinet Magazine, a quarterly art and culture non-profit magazine run out of Brooklyn. Cabinet also publishes books and curates exhibitions. Emilie was an Editor-in-Chief of Ink & Image 14, the most recent number of the Department of Art History’s journal of undergraduate research in art history and urban design and architecture studies.
Many, many thanks to all of our alumni for writing in with so much wonderful news. Hearty and heartfelt congratulations on all of your achievements, activities, and milestones. We hope that you and your loved ones remain well and are staying safe, and we hope to hear from more of you for our next “Alumni News” round-up, which we’ll post sometime in spring, 2023. Great thanks go to departmental faculty Mosette Broderick, Dennis Geronimus, Carol Krinsky, and Jon Ritter for their contributions to this blogpost; to our former Administrative Aide (and Department of Art History alumna) Ozana Plemenitash for sending out the call for news; and to Manager Peggy Coon for assistance putting it together.
Phil Tajitsu Nash (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ’78; J.D. Rutgers School of Law–Newark) has been assisting his anthropologist wife for thirty years as they train a new generation of indigenous youth in the Brazilian Amazon to take photos, create videos, and record, transcribe and translate oral histories of the elders to capture the changes seen by the introduction of literacy, money, and other factors. In June, one of their protégés, school teacher Piratá Waurá, was one of 12 indigenous youth worldwide to win a special Pulitzer Center prize in a contest to have indigenous photographers document the effects of climate change. While not a photographer himself, Nash credits his NYU Fine Arts training for helping him to understand enough about photography to help this young man to shoot and curate his photos.
Nancy J. Ruddy (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘70s; M.Arch CUNY), a founding partner of the interior design and architectural firm CetraRuddy Architecture, was honored as a Power Woman at Bisnow’s New York Women Leading Real Estate Cocktail Event, held on September 28, 2022. The award celebrates 50 of the industry’s top innovators, dealmakers and thought leaders across various different verticals in the commercial real estate industry. Of the seven honorees in the Construction, Architecture & ESG category, Nancy was the only architect in the group. Pictured below with fellow honorees L to R:
Sara Kendall, Vice President & General Manager, Turner Construction; Gina Bocra, Chief Sustainability Officer, NYC Department of Buildings; Mimi Raygorodetsky, Principal, Langan; Julie Lurie, Senior Managing Director, ESG Chair, Tishman Speyer; Nancy J. Ruddy, Founding Partner, CetraRuddy Architecture
(Not Pictured: Cheryl McKissack Daniel, President, CEO, McKissack; Charlotte Matthews, Head of Affordable Electrification, Google)
Olenka Z. Pevny (B.A. Fine Arts ‘85; M.A., Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts, NYU ’95) was a keynote speaker at NYU’s Medieval and Renaissance Center Annual Conference, “Leaving Home,” held 4-5 November 2022. Pevny lectured on “The War in Ukraine: Effaced Itineraries of ‘The Other’ in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.” Pevny is a College Lecturer in Slavonic Studies in Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. Previously she was Associate Professor of Byzantine and Medieval Art and served as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Richmond, Virginia.
Tarek Ibrahim (B.A. Fine Arts ‘00) lives in Berlin where he works in the curatorial department at the Humboldt Forum, the rebuilt Royal Palace. He is teaching a course about the Museum Island for NYU Berlin while he works on his Ph.D. at Humboldt University.
Gabriel Wick (B.A. Gallatin/Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘00; M. A. Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley ‘03; M2 in landscape conservation, École d’Architecture de Versailles ’09; Ph.D. History, Queen Mary University of London ‘17) has curated several exhibitions and advises owners of historic gardens about their conservation. As Gabriel puts it in his “Humanities Commons” bio , his research focuses on political culture in the pre-Revolutionary period, and in particular the meanings attached to English-inflected aesthetics and pastimes.” Among his many publications is his most recent book, Vivre à l’antique de Marie-Antoinette à Napoléon Ier (2021). Gabriel also teaches for NYU Paris.
Michele Saliola (B.A. Art History, Studio Art minor ‘01; M.A. Institute of Fine Arts, NYU ‘03) was promoted to Senior Director of Philanthropy and Grant Management at The Newark Museum of Art and has this update: “Don’t miss out: we are a must-see global collection just minutes from Manhattan by train. Ranked 12th largest collection in the nation, we have always been ahead of the curve in celebrating artists of color and the artistic achievements of under recognized people and cultures.” To plan your visit, visit NMOA’s website. This year, Michele was also appointed to the Historic Preservation and Documentation Committee of Scotch Plains Township in Union County, New Jersey, and currently serves on the Preserve the Shady Rest Committee, a 501c3 which preserves and provides access to the Shady Rest Golf & Country Club in Union County, New Jersey. Founded in 1921 as America’s first country club welcoming Black members, Shady Rest attracted a-list jazz performers, pro athletes and the Black cultural elite through the 1950s. Michele and her fellow Committee members marked Shady Rest’s 100th Anniversary by announcing the Clubhouse’s official listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a place for recreation for diverse families, then and now. Want to get involved? Follow Preserve Shady Rest on Facebook or contact Preserveshadyrest@gmail.com.
Jacob Simpson (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘01; M.A. Planning, MIT ‘05) earned his Ph.D. in Planning earlier this year from University College London’s The Bartlett School.
Saskia Verlaan (B.A. Art History ‘02; M.A., Courtauld Institute of Art ‘09; Ph.D. in progress, CUNY Graduate Center) was awarded the 2022-2023 Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize in Modern Italian studies. She is currently in residence at the American Academy in Rome until July 2023, where she is pursuing research on her doctoral dissertation, “Between Drawing and Script: Asemic Writing by Feminist Artists in Italy 1968–1980.” Examining the work of Irma Blank, Dadamaino, Betty Danon, and Maria Lai, Verlaan’s project analyzes asemic writing as a semiotic, Italian-feminist, and immigrant project and argues for its distinctiveness in relationship to international practices of conceptual art.
Lydia Mattice Brandt (B.A. Art History ‘04; M.A./Ph.D. University of Virginia, 2011) is a Professor in the School of Visual Arts at the University of South Carolina. Her most recent article, co-authored with Philip Mills Herrington of James Madison University, and published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 81, 1 (2022): 63–84, is “The 1960s Antebellum Plantation at Stone Mountain, Georgia.” As the authors write, “The publication of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind in 1936, followed by the release of its landmark film adaptation in 1939, inspired a generation of readers and moviegoers to yearn to travel to Tara, the fictional Georgia home of Mitchell’s pampered heroine, Scarlett O’Hara. Opened in 1963 at the new Stone Mountain Park, 15 miles northeast of Atlanta, the Antebellum Plantation catered to tourists wishing to catch a glimpse of the storybook Old South” (p. 63). Brandt and Herrington examine the history, architecture, and decoration of this modern replica plantation that presents a sanitized version of southern history. Brandt and Herrington are at work on a book-length study of the phenomenon of “plantation revivals” in the United States.
Sara Allain-Botsford (B.A. Art History ‘07) recently completed a Master’s in Art History and Museum Studies at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. She is currently exploring opportunities in London while volunteering. She is a volunteer in the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute helping to digitize the library’s collection and the Anthony Kersting archive. In the new year she will volunteer at the British Museum.
Larisa Grollemond (B.A. Art History ‘07; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania ‘16), Assistant Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Getty Museum, is proud to have co-curated, with Bryan C. Keene, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages, on view at the Getty Center from June 21 to September 11, 2022. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication of the same name. The project explored the visual construction of the Middle Ages over many centuries in illuminated manuscripts, prints and printed books, photography, cinema, reenactment, and beyond, resulting in a rich variety of modern medievalisms that are very much a part of popular culture today. For more information about the exhibition and links to the book and a variety of digital media created in conjunction with show (including a Google Arts & Culture version of the exhibition and a Spotify playlist).
Ksenia Nouril (B.A. Art History ‘09; Ph.D. Art History, Rutgers University ‘18) and her family have resettled in Queens. As Ksenia writes, “In September, I transitioned from my role as Jensen Bryan Curator at The Print Center in Philadelphia to the role of Gallery Director and Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at The Art Students League of New York. Please, come visit us at the League!” Ksenia remains connected to The Print Center: recently (on October 27) she launched her book with the artist Carmen Winant, “an artist’s intervention into the photographic archives of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence & Women In Transition. [The book] illuminates the invisible experiences of women and feminist strategies for survival, revolt & self-determination. Through its expansive consideration of image-making, domestic violence and feminism, it acknowledges the power of photography in depicting how women view themselves, and how photography can serve as a tool in the struggle or individual autonomy & self-representation. It complements a solo exhibition titled A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures, mounted at The Print Center in April 2022.” More information about the exhibition can be found here: http://printcenter.org/100/a-brand-new-end/. The show was reviewed in numerous publications, including most recently CAA Reviews: http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/4086#.Y0lkri-ZNo6
Alexis Wang (B.A. Art History ‘09; M.A./Ph.D. Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University ‘22) joined the faculty of the Department of Art History at SUNY Binghamton this September as Assistant Professor of Art History, https://www.binghamton.edu/art-history/people/profile.html?id=awang13. Alexis teaches courses in medieval art and architecture, including the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions of the medieval Mediterranean. Her areas of research specialty include Italian art of the high and late Middle Ages, embedded objects in Italian monumental church decoration, the circulation of portable objects, and the relationships between materiality and meaning in medieval visual culture.
Adina Haramati (B.A. Art History ‘10) earned her M.D. degree in 2015 from Albert Einstein College, Bronx NY. After an internship at Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX), she happily returned to New York City. She is now a cardiothoracic radiologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan.
Rebecca Rau (B.A. Art History ‘11; M.A. Art Business, Sotheby’s Institute London ‘16), fourth generation of New Orleans’s preeminent fine art, antique, and jewelry gallery, M.S. Rau, is excited to announce that after a largescale expansion and renovation in the French Quarter, M.S. Rau was named America’s “Coolest” Jewelry Store by InStore Magazine for 2022. The gallery celebrates its 110th year of business this year. In honor of the anniversary, Rebecca spearheaded a collaboration with New York jeweler Oscar Heyman, which was also founded in 1912. The collection debuts in late October and can be read about in Robb Report and JCK. Do not be fooled – fine art is still Rebecca’s first love – and she’s pleased to announce the gallery’s latest exhibition, Revolutionaries, exploring the legacy of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, which will feature masterpieces by Pierre Bonnard and Henri-Edmond Cross, as well as other works of significance by many usual suspects.
This summer, Charlie Tatum (B.A. Art History ‘11) took on the role of Director of Marketing and Communications at the New Orleans Museum of Art. For more about Charlie’s other projects see his website.
Kaylee Alexander (B.A. Art History, ‘13; M.A. History of Art & Architecture ‘15, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Ph.D. Art History & Visual Culture, Duke University ‘21) is the recipient of a 2022 Emerging Voices Fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS). Her project, tentatively titled “The US Cemetery Audit,” focuses on an ambitious data collection effort to track and assess inequity in the US burial landscape. As Kaylee puts it, “The project is informed not only by my dissertation findings regarding socioeconomic erasure and the market for funerary monuments in 19th-century Paris, but also my work as a volunteer researcher for Geer Cemetery in Durham, NC and recent developments in the field of monument studies. I will be taking an experimental and aggregate approach to studying US cemeteries and their development to investigate visible and invisible changes to US deathscapes over time.”
Karen Zabarsky (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘13) sends this news: “In January I launched my own creative and design studio for the built environment, called Ground Up.”
Emily Young (B.A. Art History/Urban Design & Architecture Studies, French minor, ‘14) won the Sibyl Moholy-Nagy History & Theory Essay Award this past May—her first year at Pratt’s M.Arch I program—for her essay titled “The Spiritual Body in the Construction of Bauhaus Architecture.” Find out more here.
Nora Gorman (B.A. Art History ‘15; M.S.Ed. Bank Street College of Education ‘22) graduated from Bank Street College of Education’s M.S.Ed. program in Leadership in Museum Education this May, and has recently joined the teaching staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art as Assistant Educator, College and University Programs. In addition to working with visitors in the galleries, her role includes oversight of The Met Collective https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/the-met-collective, the committee of college students that plans events for their NYC-area peers, and support of The Met’s undergraduate and graduate internship programs. Nora’s work with The Met began with an internship while she was at NYU, and she looks forward to drawing on all she learned in the Department of Art History lecture halls in her new position.
Jiawei (Jerry) He (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies/Computer Science ‘16; M.Arch. Princeton University ‘20) writes, “I wanted to share that I and my project “Trenton MOVES” recently were awarded ‘2022 Young Professional’ and ‘2022 Outstanding Project’ by the Intelligent Transportation Society of New Jersey (ITSNJ)! I have also started volunteering at the newly formed IM Pei Foundation. I’m helping them digitize Pei’s early projects and hoping to contribute to an IM Pei Retrospective in the format of an exhibition and/or book. This is a growing effort and if you know some scholars/colleagues who are Pei experts, I’d appreciate it if you could kindly introduce me to them!” Jerry is the Executive Director of CARTS, whose goal is to provide safe, quality mobility for all.
(Charlotte) Yuyin Li (B.A. Art History, ‘19, Italian Studies and Studio Art minors) sends this news: “I’m currently in the third and final year of my study in the MA/MS dual-degree program of the Garman Art Conservation Department at SUNY Buffalo State College. This final year consists of a 12-month internship, and I’m working at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in the Department of Conservation and Scientific Research.”
Sarah Fruehauf (B.A. Art History, German minor ‘22)recently accepted a position as a Client Liaison at Sotheby’s. She also has kindly assisted Professor Krinsky with some bibliographical reference work. For more about Sarah’s interests see https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-fruehauf.
Elizabeth Guo (B.A. Art History ‘22) began the Masters in Arts Administration program at Columbia University this fall. This summer, meanwhile, she earned an intern position at Pace’s Gallery. For more about Elizabeth’s interests, go to https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-guo-9673a4219.
Audrey Peterson (B.A. English Literature, Art History minor ‘22) writes, “This summer, I began working full-time as an assistant at Paula Cooper Gallery. The gallery reopened with a Sol LeWitt show, and I got to see the process of installing a wall drawing.”
Hannah Rothbard (B.A. Steinhardt, Studio Art, Urban Design & Architecture Studies minor ‘22) recently began a new position as Assistant Manager at MTA Arts & Design, whose mission is to “encourage the use of public transit by presenting visual and performing arts through the MTA system.”
The response to our call for alumni news this spring was tremendous! Great thanks to all of you for taking the time to write in despite the ongoing challenges of the pandemic. Hearty and heartfelt congratulations on all of your achievements, activities, and milestones. We hope that all of you and your loved ones remain well and are staying safe, and we hope to hear from more of you for our next “Alumni News” round-up, which we’ll post sometime in fall, 2022. Great thanks go to departmental faculty Mosette Broderick, Dennis Geronimus, Carol Krinsky, and Jon Ritter for their contributions to this blogpost, and to our Administrative Aide Ozana Plemenitash and Manager Peggy Coon for assistance putting it together.
Phil Tajitsu Nash (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘78; J.D. Rutgers School of Law–Newark) has been teaching Asian Pacific American History, Art, and Public Policy classes at the University of Maryland, College Park since 1996. In honor of Professor Carol Krinsky’s “Cities in History” course, he created a DC– Chinatown tour that allows him to teach redevelopment history and architectural highlights in the classroom, followed by a walking tour that ends in one of the few remaining non-franchise Chinatown restaurants. Here is more about Nash’s research, publications, and other activities.
Valerie Mercer (B.A. Fine Arts, German minor ’79; M.A. Fine Arts, Harvard University) was recently the subject of an NYU Alumni profile and interview in “NYU Alumni & Friends Connect.” Among her many achievements in her remarkable career, Mercer is the inaugural Curator of the General Motors Center for African American Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), a position to which she was appointed two decades ago. Previously, she had been a curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, an adjunct professor at The City College of New York, and a visiting lecturer at The Rhode Island School of Design. In the interview Mercer singles out for mention the courses in the Department of Art History (then, the Department of Fine Arts) that particular “excited” her, including lectures by Professors Carol Krinsky and the late Robert Rosenblum. To learn more about Mercer’s career and her role as a “champion of Black art and artists,” look here.
Valerie Mercer
On April 22, 2022 Olenka Z. Pevny (B.A. Fine Arts ‘85; M.A., Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts ‘95) delivered a lecture on “Lacunae of Art History and Kyiv’s Visual Culture.” Dr. Pevny’s presentation was the inaugural lecture in the Virtual Lecture and Conversation Series, “From Kyivan Rus’ to Modern Ukraine: Virtual Conversations on History, Art, and Cultural Heritage,” which is co-sponsored by North of Byzantium, Dumbarton Oaks, and Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700 (University of Kent). Pevny is a College Lecturer in Slavonic Studies in Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. Previously she was Associate Professor of Byzantine and Medieval Art and served as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Richmond, Virginia. Pevny also contributed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s acclaimed 1997 exhibition, The Glory of Byzantium. As she puts it on her webpage, Pevny “studies the role of visual culture as a locus of expression in narratives of communal, regional, national, religious, class and gender identity… she has explored the reception and acculturation of the Orthodox visual tradition in Eastern Slavic lands, particularly in Kyivan Rus’, Ruthenia, the late Russian Empire, and Soviet and contemporary Ukraine.” For more about Pevny and her research, look here.
Nina Wishnok (B.A. Art History ‘89; M.A. Graphic Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design ‘95), after over a decade designing at the MIT Media Lab, has founded a new creative collective: N of Many. Also a practicing printmaker, Nina celebrates a year of partnership with the Bromfield Gallery in Boston’s SoWa arts district with a solo show, “Things are Getting Dark,” running from May 4–29, 2022.
Elizabeth Dospěl Williams (B.A. Art History/Romance Languages ‘04; M.A., Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts ‘15), who is Associate Curator at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington DC) responsible for their Byzantine collections, presented a paper via Zoom on January 18, 2022 titled “The Lives of Things: Hoarding Jewelry in the Early Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.” Her talk was part of the winter 2021/2022 Byzantium in Mainz & Frankfurt lecture series. For more about Dospěl Williams’s work, including her research, publications, and curatorial initiatives and responsibilities, go here.
Christian J. Zaino, M.D. (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘06; MED ’10) became a partner at the Orthopedic Institute of New Jersey on January 1, 2022. Two weeks later, on January 11, he and his wife Joanna Rose welcomed Alessio Joseph into the world. Alessio loves architecture and reading The Triumphal Arch, a book by Peter Howell of NYU London with his dad.
Alessio Joseph ZainoChristian and Alessio Joseph Zaino
Marci Kwon (B.A. Art History ‘07; Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts ‘16), who is Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University, will participate in “The Future of Asian American Art History: A Conversation with Marci Kwon and Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander.” The event is sponsored by IFA Contemporary Asia, and will be livestreamed on Tuesday, May 3rd at 6:00 PM (for more information, go here). Kwon and Alexander co-direct the Asian American Art Initiative of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. Kwon’s first book, Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. For more information about Marci’s research, publications, and projects, go here.
Kaitlin Booher (B.A. Art History, ‘08; Ph.D. candidate, Art History, Rutgers University) sends this news: “I am delighted to share that in March 2022, I joined the Museum of Modern Art as the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography. I am also in the process of completing my dissertation about the history of fashion photography at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue between 1929 and 1968. Additionally, an exhibition that I co-organized for the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto will open in January 2023. Titled Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81, the show is an in-depth look at Mark’s 1976 project photographing women living in a locked psychiatric facility. My essay for the accompanying book, which will be published by Steidl this spring, explores Ward 81 within the broader historical context of mental healthcare and photography.”
Sarah Rogers Morris (B.A. Art History ’08; M.A. History of Design, Decorative Arts, and Material Culture, Bard Graduate Center ‘13), who is pursuing a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago, was recently named as a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow. This twelve-month appointment, which begins in June, will support her dissertation research at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and National Museum of American History (NMAH). Her project, “Photographic Infrastructures: The Framing of American Architectural Photography, 1890 – 1940,” revises the history of American architectural photography by revealing a genealogy of colonial encounters framed by cameras and classrooms. Through a series of global case studies, the dissertation investigates the place of visual instruction (the use of images as didactic tools) in a growing movement to expand access to public education, instill feelings of national belonging, and grow the world economy. It situates photographic surveys of infrastructure created for school children and sponsored by imperial, state, and commercial actors between 1890 and 1940 in a transnational history of empire formation. The Smithsonian’s collection of photographs published by the Keystone View Company is central to Sarah’s research. As she puts it on her webpage, Sarah “studies photography and architectural modernism within an international frame.” For more about Sarah’s research and projects, go here.
Sarah Colacino (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies/Music ‘09; M.Arch. City College of New York ‘12) sends this news: “I am an architect at Korb and Associates in Milwaukee, WI. My husband Isaac (also NYU ’09) and I moved our family to Milwaukee in 2019 after six years living in the DC area. I had the privilege of working on Ascent, the tallest timber tower in the world (as of this writing), and recently attended the topping out ceremony where I stood on the very top of the timber roof to take in the beautiful Lake Michigan view. We have a 4 ½-year-old son Ezra, and our daughter Ruby was born July 19, 2021.”
Sarah ColacinoEzra and Ruby
In December 2021 Alexis Wang (B.A. Art History ‘09; Ph.D. Columbia University ‘22) successfully defended her doctoral dissertation,“Intermedial Effects, Sanctified Surfaces: Framing Devotional Objects in Italian Medieval Mural Decoration,” written under the supervision of Professor Holger Klein of Columbia’s Department of Art History & Archaeology. Dr. Wang’s doctoral research was supported by fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; to learn more about her dissertation go here. She has presented several talks related to her dissertation, including “Transfiguring Frescoes: Framing Panel Paintings in Italian Medieval Mural Decoration” at the56th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo MI (May, 2021); “The Embedded Image in Medieval Italy” in The Pre-Modern Art History: New Approaches Lecture Seriessponsored by Binghamton University (March, 2022) and “Mirrors, Rainbows, and the Aesthetics of Reflection in the Arena Chapel, Padua” in the NYC Inter-University Doctoral Consortium organized by Fordham University’s Center for Medieval Studies (April, 2022). Her undergraduate honors thesis, written under the supervision of Professor Kathryn Smith, was a co-winner of the 2009 Borgman thesis prize. Along with Malcolm St. Clair (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘09), Alexis co-founded the department’s journal of undergraduate research, Ink & Image.
Ashley Tan (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘12; J.D. Boston University School of Law ‘15) was appointed as an Associate Member of the Planning Board for the City of Cambridge, one of the largest municipalities in Massachusetts, last fall. In her day job, she is a real estate attorney.
Anabel Wold (B.A. Art History ‘12) sends this news: “Formerly the Associate Director at 303 Gallery, New York, in May 2021 I accepted a new position as Photographs Specialist, Artnet Auctions & Private Sales, at Artnet in New York.” Contact: awold@artnet.com
Riad Kherdeen (B.A. Art History, Chemistry minor ‘13; M.A. Institute of Fine Arts ‘16; Ph.D. candidate History of Art, University of California, Berkeley)sends this news: “After having spent over a year and a half in Morocco for fieldwork research on my dissertation, “Spectral Modernisms: Decolonial Aesthetics and Haunting in the Aftershock of Morocco’s Agadir Earthquake (1960),” I am now in France completing the final leg of my fieldwork. I am delighted to share that I have just been awarded predoctoral fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities (UC Berkeley). I was also a finalist for a CASVA predoctoral fellowship and was named an alternate. Previously, I was a fellow of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) and UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Last summer I presented at the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) triennial conference. I also contributed to the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Surrealism volume, edited by Kirsten Strom, with a chapter on surrealism in the Arab World.” Riad is writing his dissertation under the supervision of Professor Anneka Lenssen in Berkeley’s History of Art Department.
Ariane Prache (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ’13; M.Arch Historic Preservation/M.S. Conservation, Columbia University GSAPP ‘19) was promoted to Associate at the New York architectural firm Bleyer, Blinder, Belle.
Stephanie Morales (B.A. Environmental Studies/Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘14) sends this news: “After graduating in 2014 I went to architecture school at the University of Oregon and I now work at Mahlum Architects in Portland, Oregon. In my own time, I also serve as the AIA Oregon Treasurer and am a member of the AIAO Committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and the Portland chapter of NOMA (The National Organization of Minority Architects).”
Nora Gorman (B.A. Art History ‘15) is graduating this spring with an MSEd from the Leadership in Museum Education program at Bank Street College of Education. She is currently the Group Sales and Docent Program Coordinator at the New-York Historical Society, a Contractual Educator for Family Programs at The Met Cloisters, and a trustee of the NYC Museum Educators Roundtable.
Elizabeth Meshel (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘15), who is completing her Masters in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of British Columbia, has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to work with the Balkan Heritage Foundation in Bulgaria for eight months next year. As Elizabeth reports, “I will be researching heritage conservation funding trends to help heritage sites get money for what they and the local community need, rather than what is important to a governing body or external funder with socio-political motives. I will also excavate at one of their sites, visit several of them, and learn from a variety of heritage conservation practitioners.” Meshel wrote an honors thesis under the supervision of Professor Carol Krinsky about the arches of Emperor Septimius Severus.
Savannah Fitzgerald-Brown(B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ’16) will begin the Masters in Urban Planning in CUNY/Hunter’s Graduate Program in Urban Policy and Planning this fall.
Jiawei (Jerry) He (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies/Computer Science ’16; M.Arch. Princeton University ‘20) was awarded a Kornhauser-Gervasio Graduate Fellowship, an endowed fellowship for research on Transportation Engineering, to support his graduate work at Princeton. Jerry recently became the Executive Director of CARTS, which focuses on “human-centered autonomy, new mobility, urban design, and public engagement.” CARTS is located in Princeton and is affiliated with the university. As Jerry reports, “I’m working on the Trenton MOVES project to build the first autonomous vehicle (AV) based urban transit system in America, to provide mobility for all especially the currently underserved through the promising scalability of AV technology.”
Emma Holter (B.A. Art History ‘17) will begin the Ph.D. program in Art History at Temple University this autumn. Emma received full funding and was nominated by Temple’s Department of Art History to receive the prestigious University Fellowship, granted to admitted doctoral students who show a “high degree of potential for future success” in their field. Emma plans to work with Dr. Marcia Hall, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Renaissance Art at Temple and a scholar of Raphael, Michelangelo, and sixteenth-century painting as well technical art history; and Dr. Tracy Cooper, a specialist in the art and architecture of early modern Venice. Emma is currently writing her Master’s thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London under the supervision of Dr. Irene Brooke on (tentative title) “Giovanni Bellini’s Lamentation Over the Dead Christ and the Chiaroscuro Aesthetic in Fifteenth-Century Venice.”
While finishing her M.A. in the History of Art at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, Sarah Mackay(B.A. Art History ’17) has accepted the position of Assistant Curator for the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; she will move to SF this summer. Her M.A. thesis, “Cellini’s Boys: Benvenuto Cellini and His Rendering of Male Beauty,” is an outgrowth of the honors thesis she wrote in the Department of Art History under the supervision of Professor Dennis Geronimus. While pursuing her Masters degree Sarah authored exhibition reviews for “The Courtauldian”, the Courtauld’s student-run publication, on which she served as a staff writer.
Anastasiya Shelest (B.A. Art History ‘17) is the Assistant Director of Cindy Rucker Gallery (New York), where she has recently curated the exhibition This is not an ideal time, which features works by Ukrainian artists. She is also the founder of ArtAsForm, a project focused on video interviews with contemporary artists.
Julia Drayson (B.A. Art History ‘18) sends this news: “I am still at The Willem de Kooning Foundation where I assist with educational, exhibition and loan initiatives, including the recent Soutine / de Kooning exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and then the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. In my spare time I have been a Team Leader and Associate Board Member of Minds Matter NYC, a college access and success program for low-income students. This spring, my eight students will be graduating and heading off to college in the fall—an exciting and bittersweet moment. I highly recommend that recent graduates join the program. It’s a wonderful organization and a great opportunity to meet young professionals and give back to the NYC community. Additionally, I recently came back from a trip to the Tyrol region of Austria and Zurich, Switzerland, where I saw both James Turrell’s Skyspace in Lech-Zürs and Marc Chagall’s vitrines at the Fraumünster Church in Zurich. Both are beautiful, and I suggest that anyone visit if they’re in the area!”
Skyspace Lech by James TurrellMarc Chagall Vitrines at Fraumünster
Anna Filonenko (B.A. Art History ‘18) sends this news: “I organized first projects with my art foundation (StandArt Foundation for Contemporary Arts), including an affordable contemporary Russian art fair (StandArt Pocket Fair) in Saint Petersburg, and an online art auction that was launched in Vladivostok (Art Against Woe). I’m also working with art history students in Saint Petersburg to develop an information resource about contemporary Russian artists (StandArt Magazine). Furthermore, the foundation coordinates the presence of the Animated Ecologies initiative in Russia. I wrote an article about the Yakutian film industry and ecology for them and hope to have my own art, education and filmmaking project in Yakutia this summer. Finally, I began a degree in filmmaking in Moscow and am currently developing several video art and short film projects.”
Rebecca Schiffman (B.A. Art History ‘18) has left Hauser & Wirth and is now the Communications Manager at the Gladstone Gallery where from November 2021 to mid-January 2022 there was an exhibition of work by James Ensor. In addition, Schiffman has enrolled in the M.A. program in Art History at Hunter College, with a view toward studying the work of women Surrealists.
Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez (B.A. Art History ‘18) sends this news: “I am finishing my third year in the Art History Ph.D. program at Stanford. I just recently passed my oral and written exams. I now have the next few months to work on my dissertation proposal. While It’s still taking form and shifting a lot, the dissertation will probably be an environmental history of Fire Island, NY through the works of artists Sanford Robinson Gifford, Alfred Leslie, Paul Thek, and Betty Beaumont. I moved back to New York from California in May, and I am currently writing/editing a book that is an expansion of my undergrad honors thesis on the artists’ magazine Newspaper. The book is a complete reprint of the publication plus an essay. It will be published by Primary Information in early spring 2023. I am also working part-time at the Brooklyn Museum as a research assistant for an upcoming exhibition on the history of zines in North America (opening November 2023).” For more about Marcelo’s research and projects go to www.marcelo-yanez.com and https://art.stanford.edu/people/marcelo-gabriel-y%C3%A1%C3%B1ez.
Carla Burkert (B.A. Art History ‘19) sends this news: “Due to the pandemic I relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio, where I have been working as an Art Specialist at an e-commerce auction house. With the guidance of an amazing supervisor I learned to specialize in prints, from 16th-century maps to contemporary art. So far, I have had the opportunity to catalog and authenticate works by artists such as Matisse, Miró, Diebenkorn, and Hockney. Just a few months ago I received my admissions letter to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Visual and Critical Studies Graduate Program, which I am excited to attend beginning this fall.”
Ladan Jaballas (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘19) has been admitted to the J.D. program at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.
Olivia McCaughey (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies/Art History ‘20) recently earned her M. in Real Estate Development from Columbia University. In the fall she began working for Housing Works as a Housing Development Associate, helping the organization manage a development pipeline of over 100 units of supportive housing for homeless individuals living with HIV/AIDS.
Niklas Persson (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘20) sends this news: “After I graduated in May 2020, I started a MSc in Urban Management and Development at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies in Rotterdam, NL. There I wrote a thesis exploring the ways in which the housing conditions of NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) residents affected their mental health. I graduated in September 2021, and then landed a job working as a Lending Analyst for an affordable housing developer called the Urban Redevelopment Authority in Pittsburgh. I have been working there since January.”
Gabriella (Gabby) Chinea (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘21) sends this news: “Since graduation, I have been working as a Project Coordinator at Central Park Conservancy in the Planning, Design, and Construction department. One of my responsibilities is acting as liaison for the Parks Department, Community Boards, Landmark Preservation Commission, and Public Design Commission for the public review process of any park design changes. I also do photographic documentation of all our construction projects, work with professional photographers and organize our park archive, graphic design for signage in the park and internal staff websites, and project planning. I really am enjoying my position and am thankful for how the Urban Design & Architecture Studies program prepared me.”
Ching-wen Janet Chuang (B.A. Art History ‘21; M.A. candidate, Visual Arts Administration, NYU) is the curator of the COVID memorial and student/faculty art exhibition for the Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Titled When the World Went Still, the exhibition features works of art and photography by Meyers students and alumni and is set to open in the Meyers Building, 433 1st Avenue, in May. Once the exhibition opens, her article on curating the show and installation shots will also be published as a featured article in the NYU Magazine.
Gray Danforth(B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘21) will begin the M.A. program in Historic Preservation in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) this fall.
Hyungjoo Han (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘21) will begin theM.A. program in Historical and Sustainable Architecture at New York University this fall.
Liza Hegedus (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ’21) will begin the M.Arch. program in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) this fall.
Mari Otsu(B.A. Art History/Psychology/French/Global Liberal Studies, with a concentration in Arts & Literatures; Studio Art and Child & Adolescent Mental Health Studies minors ‘21) accepted a position at the Smithsonian for the summer as one of their Conservation Interns for Broadening Access (CIBA; look here).
Katie Svensson (B.A. Art History ‘21) will begin the M.A. program at Institute of Fine Arts this coming fall. She will continue the study of the grotesque and the abject in contemporary art, a topic she first examined in a Department of Art History seminar taught by Professor Kathryn Smith and that she studied further in her honors thesis, written under the supervision of Professor Meredith Martin. Since graduating in May of 2021 Katie has been working as a gallery assistant at Hal Bromm Gallery in Tribeca, and as a studio assistant for three artists.
Natalie White (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘21) was awarded a New York University GSAS Master’s College Diversity Scholarship.
Hunter Wolff (B.A.Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘21) will begin the M.Arch. program in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) this fall.
It was a thrill to hear from so many of our alumni despite the continued challenges of the pandemic. Hearty and heartfelt congratulations on all of your achievements, activities, and milestones. We hope that all of you and your loved ones are well and staying safe, and we hope to hear from more of you for our next “Alumni News” round-up, which we’ll post sometime in spring, 2021. Great thanks go to departmental faculty Mosette Broderick, Carol Krinsky, and Jon Ritter and to our Administrative Aide Ozana Plemenitash and Manager Peggy Coon for their contributions to this blogpost and assistance putting it together.
Nancy J. Ruddy (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ’74), Founding Principal of CetraRuddy, recently designed a new photography museum in an 1894 Landmark building on Park Avenue South. Now the New York outpost of the internationally renowned destination in Stockholm, Fotografiska New York is a unique place for people to meet, eat, drink and experience photography through an immersive series of rotating exhibitions. Sensitive to the architectural history of the building as the former Church Missions House, the project received the 30th annual Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award.
Julie L Sloan (B.A. Fine Arts ’80), a prominent conservator of stained glass and a recognized authority on its conservation and, recently delivered a lecture on American glass via Zoom to the British Society of Master Glass Painters, a century-old organization of experts in stained and painted glass. As Professor Krinsky notes, the British members praised her for the comprehensive coverage and her clear presentation. Julie is writing a history of American glass, although with her work assignments, she can’t promise it quickly.
Jon McMillan (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘80s; M.B.A. NYU; M.S. Urban Planning, Columbia University) is Director of Planning at TF Cornerstone, a major New York City estate firm that specializes in large-scale public/private partnerships. Jon has been with the company for twenty-one years and was previously Director of Planning for Battery Park City. He oversaw the development of most of Queens West (3,400 units), is currently opening a 1,200-unit apartment project at Hunters Point South, which includes 800 affordable units, low-income senior housing, a school and a community center, has recently become involved in Atlantic Yards, and is taking a new midtown office development, 175 Park Avenue, through ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure).
Saskia Verlaan (B.A. Art History ‘02; M.A. Courtauld Institute of Art ’09; Ph.D. in progress, CUNY Graduate Center) has recently curated a new exhibition for the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas titled Spatial Awareness: Drawings from the Permanent Collection (on view October 29, 2021 – March 13, 2022). Verlaan organized the exhibition during her time as the Drawing Institute’s inaugural Pre-Doctoral Fellow in 2020-2021. Look here for more information about the exhibition and related public programs, including upcoming artist talks by Liliana Porter and Kate Shepherd.
Julia Perratore (B.A. Art History ’03; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania ’12), Assistant Curator of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters, delivered this year’s Forsyth Lecture sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) on October 14th. Perratore’s lecture, “Representing Medieval Spain at The Met Cloisters,” detailed the process of putting together her important new exhibition, Spain, 1000-1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith, on view at The Cloisters until January 30, 2022. For further information see our earlier blogpost .
Christian J. Zaino, M.D. (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’06; MED ’10) is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon specializing in hand, upper extremity, and microscopic surgery. He practices in Morristown and Randolph, New Jersey. He and his wife Joanna are expecting their first child in January, 2022.
Ksenia Nouril (B.A. Art History ’09; Ph.D. Rutgers University ’18) writes, “I am happy to share news of my biggest and greatest project: my daughter Nina Beatrice Nouril was born on May 24, 2021 at 4:34am in Philadelphia at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania after 27 hours of unmedicated labor. Attached is a photo after birth and a more recent one — at 4.5 months. Nina’s father Bruno is also an NYU alum—’08, Religious Studies. For 15 weeks after Nina’s birth, I was on leave from The Print Center, where I am still Jensen Bryan Curator. That said, I enjoyed writing this book review—with Nina—of the Designing Motherhood catalogue, a very timely topic, for The Brooklyn Rail.
Christina Smith (M.A. Historical & Sustainable Architecture ’11) was among the professionals honored by the American Society of Landscape Architects earlier this year. Christina is president and CEO of Groundwork Bridgeport, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating the next generation of ecologically minded landscape architects by teaching high school students about sustainability, horticulture, and environmental stewardship. The City of Bridgeport, CT, serves as the students’ laboratory, where they transform blighted blocks into playgrounds, parks, and gardens and are often mentored by local professional landscape architects,” as ASLA’s website notes. The committee praised Christina for her efforts to “helping young men and women find careers in green industry professions” and her dedication to “empowering local youth to identify and solve issues in their communities.” Read more about her nomination.
James Newhouse (B.A. Art History / B.S. Chemistry, ‘12) earned his M.S. in Cosmetic Science from the University of Cincinnati James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy this past May. His capstone research focused on the use of natural ingredients in lipstick formulation, including experimental formulation work and performance testing. After the acquisition of BASF’s pigments division by Sun Chemical, James is continuing his chemist role in global product development for new cosmetic effect pigments, with additional responsibilities in digital asset generation for new product launches and re-promotions. James combines creativity with technical expertise to capture the brilliant visual effect of the pigment products in high quality photography and videos, used in internal communications, customer presentations, corporate social media, and professional trade shows.
Jesslyn Guntur (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ’15) is the PR and Communications Director at Accept & Proceed, a B Corp-certified creative studio dedicated to bringing positive change in society. Previously she was the Senior Communications & PR Manager at BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, an architecture practice she has worked with for four years, first in New York then London, where she currently lives.
Valerie Itteilag (B.A. Art History, Urban Design & Architecture Studies Minor ‘15) sends this news: “I graduated last summer from RCA (Royal College of Art, the #1 Art and Design University in the world) with an M.A. in Interior Design (Interior Architecture per US standards) in July 2020, after the pandemic brought me back from London to my hometown of Washington, DC in March of 2020. While at RCA I received a Distinction for my dissertation, “How a Vernacular American Home and Its Residents Define, Refine, and Change Formal American Living Styles Over 100 years,” which traced the changes in living patterns over a century, using the ownership and use of a single American Foursquare home in the northeastern US as a case study. My yearlong research and concept development on my thesis design project focused on the adaptive reuse of St. Pancras Waterpoint (Grade II Listed building by Office of Sir George Gilbert Scott). This research and site became the base project for this year’s (2020-2021) Detail Platform, led by Ian Higgins, the program leader of second years. See the talented work of Ian Higgin’s platform group Interior Detail 2020-1 here. My Master’s Thesis Project, “1872 to 2020,” the adaptive reuse of the St. Pancras Waterpoint (Grade II Listed building by Office of Sir George Gilbert Scott), can be found here. I am currently working in real estate in Washington, DC while I consider doing an M.B.A. back in Europe or returning to London for work.”
Ezequiel Amador (B.A. Art History ’16), recently started the M.A./Ph.D. program in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was awarded the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, a multi-year award extended to students from underrepresented backgrounds who are pursuing a career in university teaching and research. In his graduate studies Ezekiel will focus on modern and contemporary Latin American art.
Mary-Brett O’Bryan (B.A. Art History ’17) began the Masters program in Museum Studies at NYU in the spring. While completing her Masters, Mary-Brett will continue her role as Director of Human Resources at RAA, the museum planning and exhibition design firm in New York.
Linda Tauscher (B.A. Art History, French minor ’18) earned her Masters in Fine Arts from the Institute of Fine Arts earlier this year. This fall she began law school at University of California, Davis and so far, she is “loving it.” As Linda further writes, “Although ideally for art law it would be in either New York, Washington DC or Los Angeles, UC Davis offered me a generous scholarship, and Davis is only twenty minutes from Sacramento and about an hour from the Bay Area. So far, my impression has been really positive: the professors are incredibly kind and supportive and the whole community seems much more collegial than what the stereotype of law school had led me to believe. The school has a lot of resources for public interest work and I think it was the right choice for balancing my desire to ‘help people’ and potentially working in art law or doing something related to intellectual property.”
Talia Bush (B.A. Art History, Urban Design and Architecture Studies minor, ’19; M.A. Historical and Sustainable Architecture ‘20) wrote a Masters thesis titled “From the Ashes, She Will Rise: Assessing Reconstruction Approaches to Notre Dame de Paris after the Fire of April 2019 and the Importance of Structural Engineering in the Gothic Vernacular.” She was the inaugural recipient of the Margaret Richardson, OBE, Award for an Outstanding Thesis in the Field of Architectural History. After graduating Talia became a volunteer at Taliesin Preservation (Wisconsin), and she is currently a cataloguer in the Impressionist and Modern Art Department at Sotheby’s (New York). Her article, “Wright’s Influence in Fairfield & Westchester Counties” was published in Antiques and the Arts Weekly on September 25, 2020.
Adriana Virgili (B.A. Art History and Philosophy ’19) sends this news: “After graduating and interning at the Grey Art Gallery I started working at Koszyn & Company, a major NYC-based fundraising and capital campaign firm with clients that include major museums and cultural institutions. I worked at the Company’s New York office during 2020, where I gained invaluable experience in development as well as the nonprofit industry. I moved to Madrid in 2021, with a brief stay in Paris to attend a theater course, and am still working for the Company, where I was recently named Director of Operations and Client Relations. I am greatly enjoying Madrid and would love to see any fellow alumni if you happen to visit!”
Sabina Vitale (B.A. Art History ’19) recently began working at the Laguna Art Museum in southern California, where she is the assistant to the Executive Director. Sabina writes, “I was hired full-time in June, after completing a few months as a Visitor Services representative. It has been such a fun ride. The museum is experiencing a great deal of change, and that along with the small size of the organization is allowing me to learn so much. I could never have imagined ending up here but I’m so happy I did!”
Iyad Abdi (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ’20) was awarded a Fulbright grant for graduate study in Italy at the Politecnico di Milano (Milan) to pursue a Masters of Science degree in Urban Planning and Policy Design. Iyad began his studies and the grant period this fall.
Abby Lamdan (B.A. Art History ’21) sends this news: “Since graduating from NYU I have been employed by Etsy. As a member of the Seller Labs team, I contribute to the ideation and execution of different projects that help Sellers in the Etsy marketplace perform at their highest potential. I am so grateful to be able to work for and with creative individuals and to have an impact on small businesses and artists around the world.”
Alisa Nurmansyah (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies/Economics ’21) recently began the Masters program in Urban Planning at Columbia University.
Fields of Vision 