CAA News Today

Congratulations to our 2025/2026 Professional Development fellows, Ali Derafshi, University of California, Santa Barbara (for Art History) and Dan Hernandez, University of Las Vegas (for Visual Art)!   

Honorable Mentions: Lauren Bock, The University of Texas at Austin (Art History); Clara Pérez Medina, Berkeley University; Nora Lambert, University of Chicago (Art History); and Sopheak Sam, Cornell University (Visual Art). 

Ali Derafshi is an architect and architectural historian whose research bridges architectural and reception theory with immigration, exile, and diaspora studies. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MArch from McGill University, an MA in Landscape Architecture, and a BA in Architecture from Iran. His dissertation, “From Persomania to Persophobia: ‘Persian Architecture’ and Its Reception in Twentieth-Century California,” examines how shifting societal attitudes—ranging from admiration to rejection of Persian material culture in the United States before and after the 1979 Hostage Crisis—have shaped the perception, creation, and reception of what has been understood as Persian architecture in California throughout the twentieth century. He is currently revising his dissertation into a book manuscript. In addition to his research, he has recently joined the Division of Facilities and Construction at the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

Dan Hernandez is a multidisciplinary artist based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Hernandez considers the different social and environmental forces that shape our self-perception through drawings, sculptures, and performances that layer references to pop culture and childhood. He is set to graduate this spring with an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Hernandez’s artistic journey has taken him to various galleries and museums across Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Illinois, and California. Recently, he completed a residency with Meow Wolf, which included an installation at Omega Mart in Las Vegas and a collaborative project for UNLV’s Artwalk. Additionally, he partnered with McDonald’s to create a sculpture for the Midtown Maryland Parkway District Public Art Project, positioned in front of the new McDonald’s in Las Vegas. In addition to his visual art, Hernandez is the creator of the SOCIAL COMA zine and co-runs the art collaborative LovervilleUSA with his wife. His wood sculptures have made subtle appearances within urban settings across the Northwest.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

	Lauren Bock is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds BA degrees in Textile Production and Classics along with MA degrees in Classical Archaeology and Ancient Art History. Her research centers on the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean with a special focus on the history of textile production. Her dissertation, “Threads of Power: An Exploration of Textile Production Motifs in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond”, examines the intersection between power and textile production and the relationship between textile technologies and gender.
	Clara Pérez Medina is a scholar, documentary filmmaker, and photographer whose work examines how visual artifacts operate not only as representations but as spatial instruments that organize urban life, regulate access to resources, and shape racialized imaginaries of futurity. Through a case study of Oakland and Berkeley, California—spanning key turning points in the racial-spatial character of both cities from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries—their research investigates how photography, architecture, urban design and film function as spatial technologies, racial-aesthetic projects, that organize belonging, race, property, and futurity in U.S. cities. Their collaborative short films have been featured in numerous film festivals, galleries, and museum exhibitions, showcasing the work of local Black and Latinx cultural workers and activists preserving their radical pasts to protect their collective futures; their work has been supported by several foundations. Their art practice and scholarly work shows how images and aesthetics—whether journalistic, architectural, or participatory—operate spatially to organize urban life and possibility within and beyond racial capitalism.
	Nora Lambert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in late medieval and early modern Italy. Her research interests include cross-cultural interaction in the Mediterranean basin, and the gendered nature of making, viewing, and acquiring artworks. Her dissertation, “Picturing Mobility: Late Medieval and Renaissance Naples at the Threshold of the Mediterranean,” explores the wide circulation and transcontinental nature of Neapolitan commissions and collections. From 2021–2022, she was a Fulbright Fellow affiliated with the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples. She was the 2022–2024 Kress Foundation History of Art Institutional Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and remains there as 2025–2026 predoctoral fellow in the Department Michalsky.
	Sopheak Sam is an interdisciplinary artist whose sensuous and spatial interventions distill postwar intimacies, often drawn from their experience as a Cambodian refugee. Working across installation, video, sculpture, painting, and textiles, Sam’s expansive practice traces the afterlives and afterimages of refugeehood to grapple with fragmentary memories, histories, and spaces. Sam holds an MFA in Art from Cornell University and a BFA in Studio for Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. They are a recipient of a 2025 Boston Artadia Award and a 2022–2023 U.S. Fulbright Scholarship for research on the Thai-Cambodian border. Sam’s work has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally, including solo presentations at Kalm Village (Chiang Mai, Thailand) and Distillery Gallery (Boston, MA), as well as group exhibitions at Factory (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), the Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), and the Ely Center for Contemporary Art (New Haven, CT), among others. Sam’s studio practice is based between Lowell and Boston, Massachusetts, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.