CAA News Today

Congratulations to our 2024/2025 Professional Development fellows, Özge Karagöz, Northwestern University (for Art History) and Autumn Ahn, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (for Visual Art)!   

Honorable Mentions: Meghaa Ballakrishnen, Johns Hopkins University (Art History); Kelley Booze, Miami University; and Savannah Jackson, Cranbrook Academy (Visual Art). 

Özge Karagöz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. As a historian of global modern and contemporary art, her scholarship focuses on intertwined histories of post-Ottoman Turkish and Soviet art, investigating how artistic forms and their localized understandings developed through cross-cultural exchange, interdisciplinary collaborations, and anti-imperialist critique. Her dissertation, “Modern Art and Anti-Imperialist Imagination: Refiguring the Body across Turkey and Soviet Russia,” concerns an early episode of Soviet artistic internationalism with non-Western nations that was eclipsed by the ideological polarization of the Cold War. Previously, this project received generous fellowship support from the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and Northwestern’s Paris Program in Critical Theory.”

Autumn Ahn is an interdisciplinary artist living in western Massachusetts. Ahn works across sculpture, drawing, intervention, and performance, to consider the responsive conditions that produce reality within the human experience. Ahn holds an MFA in performance and critical studies, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA in painting, from Boston University. She is currently a visiting artist in residence in the Visual Arts Department at Bard College, and the recipient of a 2024 Puffin Foundation Grant and 2024 Mass Cultural Council Creative Individual Award. She has been a resident at Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting fellow in philosophy at Harvard University, and was awarded a 2023 Arts, Science + Collaboration Initiative award to conduct research with Yerkes Observatory and the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at lower cavity, Holyoke, MA; False Flag Gallery, New York; Selebe Yoon Gallery, Dakar, Senegal; Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain Grenoble (CNAC), among others. Her work has been featured in ARTE, the Emergency Index, and Boston Art Review. She is an advisor for the Converging Liberations Residency at Mass MoCA and is on the board of Boston CyberArts. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen is a postdoctoral fellow with the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, and a curatorial fellow (by courtesy) with the Offices of the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director and the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of modern and contemporary art and South Asian art, and her current book project explores the relationship between abstract art and secularism in postcolonial South Asia. Her research has been generously supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Getty Research Institute. 

Kelley Booze is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores perception, spatial awareness, and the quiet dynamics of everyday life. She holds a BFA in fine art from Columbus College of Art and Design (2009) and is working toward an MFA at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Kelley’s work engages with the subtle, often overlooked moments that shape our relationship to the world. Through a variety of materials including choreography and movement, Kelley creates work that reflects the fluidity of time and the interconnectedness of space and experience. Kelley’s work has been exhibited nationally and she has also participated in international artist residencies, expanding her exploration of site, context, and the nature of perception. In addition to her studio practice, Kelley has taught art classes and workshops and led public art initiatives with diverse communities. Through her work, she encourages a deeper awareness of the small, intimate details that often go unnoticed, offering new ways to engage with the spaces and experiences we inhabit. 

Savannah Faith Jackson is a multidisciplinary artist and MFA candidate in fiber arts at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she holds a Gilbert Fellowship. She earned her BFA in photography and imaging from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2023. Her commitment to arts education began in 2022 while teaching digital photography to women in a homeless shelter, and she currently educates high school students at Cranbrook Art Museum. Jackson’s work has been exhibited nationally, including as part of Rest is Power at NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture and the exhibition of her first-prize photograph Morgan in a Moment of Self-Reflection at the Photo Review competition exhibition Woodmere Art Museum, Chestnut Hill, PA. In 2024, she participated in the inaugural Detroit Art Fair. Her practice has garnered several prestigious awards, including the 2022 Thomas Drysdale Production Award for her project The Dream is the Truth, the 2024 Larson Venture Award, and a 2024 Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation Materials Award.