CAA News Today

The CAA-Getty International Program will welcome ten new scholars and four program alumni to the CAA 115th Annual Conference! CAA115 will mark the sixteenth year of this invaluable program, which brings a cohort of art historians, museum curators, visual arts professionals, and select program alumni from around the globe to the CAA Annual Conference each year. Grantees participate in a preconference colloquium and alumni roundtable, examining pressing topics in the field, ranging from historiography, interdisciplinary/transnational methodology, and the decolonization of our arts institutions. Read “A Global Vision: The CAA-Getty International Program” to learn more and register now for CAA115! 

2027 CAA-GETTY PARTICIPANTS  

	Munazzah Akhtar is Chairperson and Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore, Pakistan. Her research explores transcultural and transregional exchanges in the artistic production, architecture, and visual cultures of historic communities across South Asia. More recently, her work has expanded to investigate innovative approaches to architectural heritage, including architectural acoustics, immersive digital documentation, and virtual reconstruction. Her research has been recognized through several competitive fellowships and awards, including the Barakat Trust Major Award (2025), the USAID HESSA Women’s Leadership Award (2024), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Fellowship, and the Ian H. Stewart Fellowship at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, among others. She is the Assistant Editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and as Educational Advisor (2025–27) to the Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners.
	Heba Hassan Ahmed Amer is a museum curator and museum educator at the Alexandria National Museum, Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Egypt, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Faculty of Archaeology and Languages, Matrouh University. She holds a PhD in Greco-Roman History from Alexandria University. Her work bridges museum practice, heritage interpretation, and public engagement, with a particular interest in making museum collections more accessible and meaningful for diverse audiences. She has participated in several international professional and research programs, including the British Museum International Training Programme and the NINO Incoming Mobility Grant at Leiden University. Dr. Amer has presented her research at international conferences and develops educational initiatives that connect communities with cultural heritage through innovative and inclusive approaches. She is committed to fostering international collaboration, strengthening museum practice, and promoting museums as spaces for learning, dialogue, and cultural understanding.
	Zacharie Duflot Tatuébu is a Lecturer in the Department of Performing and Fine Arts at the University of Maroua, and serves as Head of Academic Affairs and Statistics at the Faculty of Letters and Humanities, University of Dschang, Cameroon. He holds a PhD in Heritage and Museology from the University of Yaoundé I, where he was awarded Highest Honors for his doctoral thesis on museum-education partnerships in Cameroon. His research critically examines postcolonial museum reconfigurations, cultural restitution, and the dialogue between heritage and national identity formation. Dr. Tatuébu has contributed to international research programs on Cameroonian artistic heritage and has curated exhibitions at the National Museum of Cameroon, the French Institute, and the Blackitude Museum, in Yaoundé. He is an active member of ICOM, ICOM-CECA, and CAA.
	Jonathan Feldman is a researcher, professor, and curator of arts from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds a PhD in Comparative Art Theory and a master’s in Art Curation from the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). Feldman works as a researcher, professor, and curator in the field of Modern and Contemporary Art. His practice offers a decolonial and transdisciplinary look into art practices, exhibitions, collections, projects, public programs, and institutions. Feldman holds various professorships at the undergraduate and graduate levels and has received multiple grants and awards. He has published over thirty articles in specialized media and has presented his research at multiple scholarly events. Also, he has curated over twenty exhibitions internationally, worked at the Getty Research Institute’s exhibitions department, and was Chief Curator of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires.
	Lydia Gatundu Galavu is a Kenyan curator, researcher, and writer focused on national art history, museum collections, and curatorial practice. She has served for over fifteen years as Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Museums of Kenya, leading exhibitions, collections research, and public engagement initiatives that explored Kenya’s artistic heritage. Her current research examines how museum collections can be used to reconstruct Kenyan art history and advance public understanding of the country’s artistic heritage. She is the curator of Wahenga wa Sanaa: Pioneers of Kenyan Art, a long-term exhibition that traces the development of Kenyan art from 1800 to 1980 through museum collections. Her broader interests include African art histories, the interpretation of prehistoric, ethnographic, modern, and contemporary art, and the role of museums in shaping national cultural narratives. She is currently researching and writing on Kenya’s museum collections.
	Ismail Kugu is a senior lecturer in the Department of Art History at Necmettin Erbakan University in Konya, Turkey. His primary focus is the consumption of Chinese and European porcelain at the eighteenth-century Ottoman court. Broadly, he specializes in the material culture of the Ottoman court, with a focus on consumption, transcultural exchange, the dissemination of objects, and object biographies. In addition, his research interests extend to provenance studies, the application of Digital Humanities tools to art history, and art historiography in Turkey. Bridging traditional art historical methodologies with digital humanities tools he applies data mining, network analysis, and spatial mapping to historical datasets. He is a member of the COST Action SENSES (CA24164 – Sensing Europe’s Court Spaces at the Crossroads of Past, Present and Future), supported by the European Union. He serves as an assistant editor and reviewer for international journals and has presented his work at various conferences across Europe and the United States.
	Sabrina Moura is a Brazilian art historian, curator, and researcher specializing in networks of artistic exchange between Africa, Latin America, and the Arab world, with a particular focus on the intersections between historical archives and contemporary artistic practices. She is Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies at the Africa Institute, Global Studies University, where she teaches and supervises graduate research. Previously, she headed the Research Section at Louvre Abu Dhabi, leading the museum’s research strategy, fellowship program, academic partnerships, and scholarly publications. She was a Fellow at global dis:connect—a program of the Käte Hamburger Research Centre at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she curated Travelling Back: Reframing a Munich Expedition to Brazil in the 19th Century (2024). Moura is the author of Arqueologia da Criação (2022) and editor of Southern Panoramas (2015). Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, UNESCO, Pro Helvetia, CNPq, the Regional Council of Île-de-France, and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
	Winniefred Naluzze is a doctoral student in art history at Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa, and an assistant lecturer at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. She is a member of the NRF/DST SARChI Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa and Global Souths Research Programme. Her doctoral research analyses how art, cultural heritage, and art as activism in Uganda can challenge ideas of physical disability in relation to social perceptions, power, and stigma. She holds a Bachelor of Industrial and Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Fine Arts from Makerere University. Her master’s thesis explored how textile design can challenge stereotypes and stigma surrounding children with autism in Uganda. She is engaged in bridging art history and disability, inspired by the need to redefine and destabilize perceptions of disability and the stigma surrounding it in Ugandan society.
	Mateus Nunes is a curator, writer, and researcher from the Brazilian Amazon based in São Paulo. He is Assistant Curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). He holds a PhD in History of Art from the University of Lisbon and completed postdoctoral fellowships in History of Art and Architecture at the University of São Paulo (USP) and in Amazonian Studies at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, supported by the Getty Foundation. Nunes’s research focuses on artistic exchange and cultural hybridism in the eighteenth-century Portuguese colonial context, with particular attention to the interconnected histories of Europe, the Brazilian Amazon, and Goa, India. His work examines how images, objects, ideas, and people circulate across imperialist dynamics, generating artistic and architectural forms through reception, transmission, and reoperation. He has edited and coedited several publications and regularly contributes to books, scholarly journals, and international magazines on art criticism.
	Viktoria Popovics is an art historian and museum curator with over a decade of experience at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest. She has curated and co-curated numerous international exhibitions and has been actively involved in collection development, acquisitions, and artistic commissions. Her curatorial project Handle with CARE received the AICA Award for Best Curatorial Project of 2023 in Hungary. Her recent exhibition Golden Repair, co-curated with Rita Dabi-Farkas, explored the concepts of healing and repair through social, political, ecological, and institutional perspectives. Her academic research explores the intersections of feminist discourse, gender politics, and contemporary art in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2025, she was a MuseumsLab Fellow in the Berlin–Addis Ababa program, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). From 2021–23, she was a member of the Getty Foundation-supported research group Narrating Art and Feminism: Eastern Europe and Latin America. She is a member of CIMAM and AICA Hungary.

 ALUMNI PARTICIPANTS

	Stephen Fọlárànmí is an artist and art historian in the Fine Arts Department at Rhodes University, South Africa. He holds a BA, MFA, MPhil, and PhD in Art History from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria. His research explores Yorùbá art studies, African aesthetics, mural art, and architecture, and he has published widely in these fields. His artistic work has been exhibited in Nigeria, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa. He was the inaugural recipient of the Höffmann-Dozentur für Interkulturelle Kompetenz at the University of Vechta, Germany (2008–09), and has received the Getty CAA International Travel Grant (2019), the CAA Travel Grant (2020), and the ACASA Travel Grant (2021). Stephen is a member of CAA, ACASA, the African Studies Association, the Society of Nigerian Artists, the Lagos Studies Association, and serves as National Secretary of the Nigerian Field Society.
	Larisa Mantovani is a researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), based at the Research Center in Art and Heritage (CIAP), Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM). She holds a PhD in History from UNSAM and a BA and a teaching degree in Art History from Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), where she teaches in the Department of Art History. She specializes in the social history of decorative arts, with a focus on art education, artistic industries, and material culture. Her current research focuses on textiles and ceramics in Argentina during the first half of the twentieth century. She is the author of El pueblo tiene derecho a la belleza: artes aplicadas, educación e industria en Buenos Aires (1910–1940) (2023). She is currently conducting the research project Art, Education, and Artistic Industries: Promoting Textile and Ceramic Development in Argentina (1910–1943). Her research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Corning Museum of Glass, and she is the recipient of an American Ceramic Circle research grant for the project Transatlantic Craft: Ceramics and Knowledge between Argentina and Spain (1920–1955).
	Heba Khairy Metwaly spent much of her career in the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), in Cairo, working hands-on with collections, documenting artifacts, and preparing exhibition spaces to tell their stories. She later joined the International Working Group of the British Museum’s Masterplan Project. She is currently leading cultural heritage projects in Saudi Arabia, with a special focus on the development of the Soudah Mountain Peaks—a place where heritage meets art, culture, and landscape in the most breathtaking way. She is deeply committed to her work with the International Council of Museums (ICOM), where she is serving her second term on the board of the International Committee for Egyptology (CIPEG).
	Natalia Moussienko is a leading research fellow at the Modern Art Research Institute of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, in Kyiv. She is also Head of the Board of the Ukrainian Fulbright Alumni Association, and a Vice-President of Europa Nostra. She is the author of numerous books and articles on cultural heritage, diplomacy, cinema, and urbanism, including Art of Maidan, Kyiv Art Space, and Arts and Politics. The National Academy of Arts of Ukraine awarded her a gold medal for her achievements. She pays special attention to arts and cultural heritage in war and has spoken widely on the topic. She is an initiator and curator of the Kyiv Museum Areal project, which reimagines a historically dense cluster of museums in central Kyiv as an integrated cultural ecosystem responding to the challenges of war, urban transformation, and international cooperation.

 This program is made possible with support from Getty.