CAA News Today

CAA is pleased to announce this year’s participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. Now in its twelfth year, this international program, supported by the Getty Foundation, welcomes twelve new participants and four alumni to attend the 2023 Annual Conference in New York City. The goal of the CAA-Getty International Program is to increase international participation in CAA’s activities and the field of visual arts in academia, thereby expanding international networks and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. We look forward to welcoming this year’s participants!  

At a pre-conference colloquium, the new participants will discuss key issues in the international study of art history together with CAA-Getty alumni and US hosts. The program will delve into topics such as postcolonial and Eurocentric legacies, decolonization of museums, scholarship and pedagogy, interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies, and the intersection of politics and art history. Learn more about the first ten years of the program in our online publication. 

Program participants—art historians, curators, and artists—hail from multiple countries, expanding CAA’s international membership and contributing to an increasingly diverse community of scholars and ideas. Selected by a jury of CAA members from a highly competitive group of applicants, each participant will receive funding for travel, hotel accommodation, conference registration, CAA membership, and a per diem. 

Alumni invited back to the 2023 conference will present at the Global Change, Crisis, and the State of the Visual Arts session while also connecting our new participants with our burgeoning group of nearly 150 CAA-Getty International Program alumni.  

REGISTER FOR CAA 2023

2023 PARTICIPANTS IN THE CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM 

Marina Grzinic is a principal research associate at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she is affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy. She holds a PhD in philosophy and is an artist with a forty-year career. She has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, since 2003, in charge of the Studio of Conceptual Art (Post-Conceptual Art Practices) at the Institute of Fine Arts. Grzinic is the principal investigator of the Austrian Science Fund and Programm zur Entwicklung und Erschließung der Künste (FWF-PEEK) project “Conviviality as Potentiality” (2021–25). She was also the principal investigator of the FWF-PEEK project “Genealogy of Amnesia (Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism and Turbo-Nationalism)” (2018–21). Her areas of expertise include contemporary philosophy, contemporary art, the study of coloniality and decoloniality, transfeminism, the analysis of racism, antisemitism, nationalism, and the study of memory and history in the context of resistance. 

Amrita Gupta is an art historian, writer, educator, and editor who works across art education and cultural management. In 2002, she joined the Mohile Parikh Center (MPC), Mumbai, and became its program director in 2005, facilitating critical thinking by curating a wide range of innovative art education programs. She runs the website V-IDEO: Ideas worth Sharing, an archive of short videos on Indian artists for which MPC is the knowledge partner. She received an MFA in art history from Viswabharati University, Santiniketan 2002.  

Her writings on modern and contemporary art have been published in anthologies, journals, and websites in India and internationally, and she has authored and edited art books for children. She was a visiting lecturer in art history at the Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai; a fellow at ARThink South Asia (ATSA); a research grantee from the India Foundation for the Arts, and curatorial advisor for Art1st Foundation, Mumbai. Her current art historical research is on Northeast India, framing the region as a “critical art geography” where one can attend to meanings that engage with global modernism and heterodox contemporaneity drawn through one’s own historical position. An essay from this research has been published in the book 20th Century Indian Art (Thames & Hudson, 2022). She is cofounder and executive editor of the independent e-journal, Partition Studies Quarterly which focuses on partition stories of Northeast India within the larger discourse of the partition in the subcontinent.  

Delaram Hosseinioun was born and reared in Tehran, Iran, and seeks to reflect the voice of Persian women in creative and comparative narratives in spite of borders and restrictions. Delaram received an MA in literary criticism from the University of Exeter and another in cultural studies from KU Leuven University. Through her PhD project at Utrecht University, titled “Unveiling the Other: The Metamorphosis of Feminist Persian Art from the Mid-Twentieth Century to the Present Day,” Delaram draws from gender theories in French psychoanalysis, such as in the works of Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler, and continental philosophy, namely in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida. Working with artists and scholars around the world, Delaram deciphers artworks as pictorial dialogues and as artists’ attempts to surpass sociocultural restrictions. The revelation and universality of the feminine voice frame her core vision. Delaram’s other passion is art journalism and interviewing artists beyond borders.  

Brigitta Isabella is a researcher of art history, critical theories, and cultural studies. Her research trajectory revolves around the (im)mobility of artists and the (im)mobilization of art within the geopolitical and geoaesthetic terrains of transnational solidarity. By looking into the transnational traffic of artists, objects, and ideas, she reexamines the reciprocity between nationalism and internationalism and how artistic traces of Third World solidarity can play a discursive part in decentralizing global art history. She studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and gained her MA in critical methodologies at King’s College, London. She is also a part of a research-action group called Kunci Study Forum & Collective and serves as the coeditor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a peer-reviewed journal published by NUS Press. She is a lecturer at the Faculty of Visual Arts in Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta.  

Żanna Komar, PhD, was born in Ukraine, lives in Poland, and is an art historian, theoretician of architecture, and exhibitions curator. She is a member of the academic staff at the Institute of European Heritage, part of the International Cultural Centre, Kraków, where she works as a content specialist. She specializes in urban studies, social and art history, and the theory and protection of cultural heritage. She is the author of numerous publications on the history of architecture and art, including the book Trzecie miasto Galicji. Stanisławów i jego architektura w okresie autonomii galicyjskiej (The third city of Galicia. Stanisławów and its architecture in the period of Galician autonomy, 2008). She writes about Art Nouveau, historicism, modernism, and contemporary art, and about totalitarian and modern architecture in present‑day Poland and Ukraine.   

Larisa Mantovani holds a PhD in history from the Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires. She has a BA in art history and a teacher training degree in art history from Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center in Art and Heritage of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CIAP/UNSAM-CONICET). She works as an assistant professor of history of decorative arts I and II at the Universidad del Salvador. Both her dissertation and current postdoctoral research focus on applied arts and the links between art, education, and industry in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century.  

Thabang Monoa’s research interests involve art history, art criticism, visual culture, curatorial practice, and cultural studies. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Tshwane University of Technology and then went on to do a master’s degree in visual art at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg. He later worked as an art historian in the faculty’s department of visual art. His doctoral study, which he undertook with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture, focused on the notion of Blackness in Afrofuturist aesthetics. Monoa is a member of the College Art Association (CAA) in the USA; a former council member of the South African Visual Art Historians (SAVAH); and is coconvenor of the Gerard Sekoto Winter/Summer School, which is administered through the Johannesburg Art Gallery. In his current capacity as a lecturer in Art History at the University of Cape Town’s Michealis School of Fine Art, Monoa continues to generate scholarly output concerning racial aesthetics, notions of futurity, and Black radical thought. 

Haoxue Nie is an assistant professor at the School of Art and Humanities, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. She holds a PhD in Western modern art history and theory from the China Academy of Art (2018). Her dissertation was published as a monograph in 2019 titled Beyond Boundaries: George Ault and Early Modern American Art. She was a recipient of the Getty Foundation grant for the 35th CIHA Congress (2019) and the international Travel Grant by Terra Foundation for American Art (2016).   

Her research covers the first half of twentieth-century American art history, especially from the 1920s to the 1950s. Recently, she has been focusing on the visual ideology of cityscapes within this period and how they remained minor artworks in the mainstream of art history, as well as the concept of time, space, and subjectivity as formal, ideological, and psychological manifestations. The intertextuality among easel painting, modern photography, and films with urban themes in American modernism is also a part of her scholarly explorations.  

Zuzanna Sarnecka is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Warsaw (Poland).  She earned her PhD in history of art at the University of Cambridge (2017). She is the author of The Allure of Glazed Terracotta in Renaissance Italy (Brepols, 2021) and coeditor of The Agency of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art. Materials, Power and Manipulation (Routledge, 2017) and The Materiality of Terracotta Sculpture in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2023). Her current research focuses on the adaptation of technique of tin-glazed earthenware from the Italian peninsula across Central Europe. In her work, she aims to construct more inclusive narratives through close investigation of microhistories that have long remained ignored, not because of the lack of sources, but because of the cult of masterpieces. She promotes multisensory perspective in studies of the arts of the past, as more immediately significant for the twenty-first-century beholder, than stylistic attributions and dating.  

Jakub Stejskal is a MASH junior research group leader at the Department of Art History, Masaryk University, Brno, where he heads the research group Remote Access: Understanding Art from the Distant Past. He has held fellowship positions at eikones (University of Basel) and Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a PhD in aesthetics from Charles University, Prague. His research interests lie at the intersection of archaeology, art history, anthropology, and philosophical aesthetics. He is the author of Objects of Authority: A Postformalist Aesthetics (Routledge, 2022) and his work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, World Art, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. 

Cheryl Chelliah Thiruchelvam holds a PhD in art history and is currently attached to the Advertising Department, Faculty of Arts and Social Science at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Malaysia. Her research interests are Hindu-Buddhist visual arts of the Southeast Asian region and to a lesser extent feminist studies. Her latest publication is a book chapter on the prevalence of the Ramayana epic in Malaysian visual arts for the book The Multivalence of an Epic: Retelling the Ramayana in South India and Southeast Asia (Manipal Universal Press, 2021). She also has a forthcoming coauthored essay entitled, “Tracing Indian Cultural Connections in Malaysia and Brunei: From Early Candis to Modern Art,” for the book Connected Histories of India and Southeast Asia: Icons, Narratives, Monuments that will be published by SAGE Publications India. Besides that, she is also interested in writing criticism, reviews, and commentary within the Malaysian art scene. 

Tanja Trška is assistant professor at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia, where she teaches courses on early modern art in Europe and present-day Croatia. She received her PhD in art history from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy (joint supervision with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb) in 2014. Her research interests center on early modern art and architecture, the exchange of cultural and artistic experiences between Italy and the eastern Adriatic coast, art patronage, and history of collections. She has collaborated on Croatian Science Foundation’s research project “Visualizing Nationhood: The Schiavoni/Illyrian Confraternities and Colleges in Italy and the Artistic Exchange with South East Europe (15th–18th centuries)” (2015–18) and is currently a team member of the research project “Provenance Research on Artwork in Zagreb Collections” (2020–24). 

PARTICIPATING ALUMNI 

Patricia D. Meneses is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Campinas (Brazil). She earned her PhD in history of the visual arts at the University of Pisa (2009). She is the author of Baccio Pontelli a Roma. L’attività dell’architetto per Giuliano Della Rovere (Felici Editore, 2010) and editor of several books, such as Arte Não-Europeia: Conexões historiográficas a partir do Brasil (Estação Liberdade, 2020) and A imagen como experimento. Debates contemporâneos sobre o olhar (Milfontes, 2021). In 2019, she was Hans Jonas visiting professor at the University of Siegen, where she taught a course on “exotic” materials in art history. She is currently part of a Connecting Art Histories project sponsored by the Getty Foundation (“Teaching and Researching Non-European Art at Brazilian Universities”). Her research focuses on the connections between art, science, and ecology in the nineteenth century. 

Natalia Moussienko is a leading research fellow at the Modern Art Research Institute of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine (Kyiv). She is the author of numerous books and articles on art history, cultural diplomacy, cinema, and urbanism, including Art of Maidan (2016), Kyiv Art Space (2013), and Arts and Politics (2002). In 2016 the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine awarded Dr. Moussienko a gold medal for her achievements in cultural diplomacy. She was also awarded a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research at the Kennan Institute, Wilson Center, in Washington, DC (2011–12), and a Thesaurus Polonia Fellowship to study at the International Cultural Center in Krakow (2017 and 2022). Dr. Moussienko is an initiator and curator of Art of Maidan, a continuing project begun in 2014 to document the explosion of artistic creativity during the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–14 and a Russo-Ukrainian war premonition in it. Central to the project is a book and exhibition that has already been presented in nineteen locations in Ukraine, the United States, and Europe. 

Shenouda Rizkalla Fahim Youssef is a trained archaeologist with extensive experience in archaeological fieldwork, database and collections management, and community outreach. His current research focus is on the museum practices in the Egyptian provinces, using the Akhenaton Museum in Minya, Egypt, as a case study. The museum, opening in 2023, will focus on the site of Tell el-Amarna, where the famous bust of Nefertiti, currently exhibited in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, was found. The aims of the presentation are to analyze the archival resources for the history of the museum, develop community outreach programs by engaging the local population with the collection, and using this to develop avenues for future outreach activities. The results will be related to wider discussions of repatriation and postcolonial heritage management in Egypt.    

Rizkalla received a PhD in Egyptology from Helwan University, Egypt. His research has been diverse, working on recording and translating Ptolemaic Period hieroglyphics, creating and executing site management strategies, and addressing the looting of archaeological sites. He has been a member of many excavations and site management missions in Egypt since 2012, has given numerous presentations and invited talks, and has written a number of academic reports and publications.   

J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi is a senior lecturer in the department of archaeology and tourism, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Global Heritage Lab, Transdisciplinary Research Area: Present Pasts, University of Bonn, Germany. Kelechi has a PhD in heritage studies from the University of York, UK, and MA and BA in archaeology and tourism as well as a diploma in tourism and museum studies from the University of Nigeria. He is a coeditor of the Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies and sits on the editorial board of the Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory book series published by the Archaeopress. Kelechi’s research interests are critical heritage studies, museum, Indigenous knowledge systems, tourism, and contemporary archaeology. His current research revisits the originating communities of ethnographic archives collected from Africa during colonialism to reengage members of the descendant communities to understand their changing significance in the present. 

We’re pleased to announce this year’s participants in the CAA-Getty International Program. Now in its eleventh year, this international program supported by the Getty Foundation will all twelve new participants and four alumni to participation in the 2022 Annual Conference. Learn more about the first ten years of the program in our online publication.

At a pre-conference colloquium, the new participants will discuss key issues in the international study of art history together with CAA-Getty alumni and US hosts. The program will delve into topics as postcolonial and Eurocentric legacies, interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies, and the intersection of politics and art history. 

Alumni invited back to the 2022 conference will present in the session Can Art History Be Affective? Empathy, Emotion and the Art Historian, chaired by Getty alumni and International Committee members Nora Veszpremi and Cristian Nae, while also providing an intellectual and social link between new participants and our burgeoning group of CAA-Getty International Program alumni.  

The goal of the CAA-Getty International Program is to increase international participation in CAA’s activities and the field of visual arts in academia, thereby expanding international networks and the exchange of ideas both during and after the conference. We look forward to welcoming the following participants. 

REGISTER FOR CAA 2022

2022 PARTICIPANTS IN THE CAA-GETTY INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM 

Tatiana Muñoz Brenes is an art curator and researcher. She has combined the exercise of cultural management with Social Sciences by having degrees in Art History and Psychology, both from the University of Costa Rica. Her training has allowed her to work on the topics of community museums, sustainability, collection research, curating exhibitions and curatorial accompaniment for artistic production. Currently, her work focuses mainly on queer art and the LGBTIQ+ community in Latin America. In addition, she has extensive experience in international projects, lectures, publications and museum training in Scotland, Portugal, Spain, China, Japan, Ecuador, and other countries. Projects can be found at www.arthistorylady.com 

Simona Cupic is Professor at the Department of Art History, University of Belgrade, Serbia. Her fields of research and teaching include art and culture between the World Wars, and the 1950s and 1960s. She is particularly interested in the visual and popular culture between 1920s and 1960s. She is the author of Mona Lisa & Superman. John F. Kennedy and the New Frontier of the Culture (2016), Elain de Kooning. Portraits (with Brandon Brame Fortune, Ann Eden Gibson, 2015), The JFK Culture (edited volume, 2013), and Bourgeois Modernism and Popular Culture. Episodes of the Fashionable, Faddish and Modern (1918-1941) (2011), among others.  

Anica Draganić is an architectural historian, conservator and multimedia artist who currently serves as an Associate Professor at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Heritage Preservation from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on Austro-Hungarian historical breweries. Her work focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European architecture, with particular emphasis on industrial heritage and identity issues in the intercultural context of Central Europe. Her extensive research on the architectural heritage of the Vojvodina region has been published in journals, conference proceedings, and books, but also presented in numerous exhibitions. Her most recent book, Shadows and Silhouettes of Industrial Past of Vojvodina, shows the complexities of the socio-political context in which the industrial architecture of a specific multicultural region emerged, developed and disappeared. She is currently particularly interested in European architecture from the socialist period, exploring its historical values and contemporary potential.  

Heba Khairy Metwaly is an Exhibition coordinator at the Grand Egyptian Museum. She Oversees and provide rigorous, accurate and efficient exhibition coordination and follow up all aspects of exhibition development between all partners in the GEM. She is a PhD researcher specialized in the Collection Management and Documentation Practices in different museums. Heba has participated in many international and national field projects and studies focusing on the tangible and intangible material culture preservation and local community engagement and development. Heba has participated in the development of the daily life gallery “P34” at the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, the European Union Funding Project of Transforming the Egyptian Museum. In 2017 she participated in the British Museum International Training Program, where she curated the Object in Focus temporary exhibition. She Also participated in many international conferences focusing on the preservation of museum collection and exhibition design.  

Roma Madan Soni is an art historian with a PhD from the University of Wolverhampton, an Assistant professor at Box Hill College Kuwait, an ecofeminist-artist, and a researcher. Her art, teaching, and research are interdisciplinary, positioned at the node of ecofeminism: practice, theory and history, and contemporary visual politics. Her articles are published in Journal of Visual Art Practice, Feminist Media Studies, Ecofeminism and Climate Change, Crafts Research, Art & The Public Sphere, Necsus, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Journal of Gender Studies, Swasti, and a chapter in Cambridge Scholars. She collaborated for conference presentations and conducted workshops at CAA, SVIMS-Pune, JNU, LSR, Raza Foundation, University of Wolverhampton, Kuwait-Nuqat, KISR, TEDx Global Day- Gulf University of Science and Technology, Dar Al Athar-Yarmouk, Kuwait University, American University of Kuwait, Box Hill College Kuwait, American Open University, UN Habitat and Beit Sadu. She has exhibited at Kunsthaus-Steffisburg, TAPRI-Finland, DarAlAthar AlIslamiyah, The Scientific Centre Kuwait, MOMA-Kuwait, Masaha13, Artsy, Mayinart, Artling, Saatchi galleries, and painted the book-cover for Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research (2021). Research grants, commissions and awards from The Scientific Centre Kuwait, Kuwait Foundation of Advanced Sciences, Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research, UN Habitat, and Arab Open University aided her research and creations. She is a member of the Museum Committee and a Reader for the Council of Readers at CAA. I chair the “Transformative Education Think Tank”-Collective Impact Coalition-Konrad Adenauer Stiftung to address Kuwait’s academic challenges. Her work has been accepted at the Venice Art Fair and Florence Biennale 2021.  

Patricia D. Meneses is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Campinas (Brazil).  She earned her PhD in History of the Visual Arts at the University of Pisa (2009). She is the author of Baccio Pontelli a Roma. L’attività dell’architetto per Giuliano Della Rovere (Felici Editore 2010) and editor of several books, such as Arte Não-Europeia. Conexões historiográficas a partir do Brasil (Esta ção Liberdade 2020), and A imagen como experimento. Debates contemporaneous sobre o olhar (Milfontes 2021). Recently, she was Hans Jonas visiting professor at the University of Siegen (2019), where she taught a course on “exotic” materials in Art History. She is currently part of a Connecting Art Histories project sponsored by the Getty Foundation (“Teaching Non-European at Brazilian Universities”). Her research focuses on the connections between art, science and ecology in the nineteenth-century. She is presently developing a book project about hummingbird’s ecology in Brazilian visual culture. 

Akinwale Onipede is an art historian, researcher and teacher at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He trained at the University of Benin, and, the University of Lagos, where he works in the area of the interface of global and local cultures and identities as expressed in visual arts. His main interest is in how developments globally in the philosophies, techniques, products and opportunities in visual arts, have affected its contemporary practice and direction in Nigeria. The universalization of cultures, consequent upon globalization, he argues, is skewed in favor of the West, whose culture is endorsed, whose pocket is deepest and whose machinery is most efficient, in the promotion of the direction of visual arts studies, practice, articulation and documentation. He is of the position that the continent that produced the great pyramids, the Nok, Igbo Ukwu, Ife and Benin masterpieces should play crucial roles in contemporary promotion of the arts. 

Melissa M. Ramos Borges is an art historian with a predilection for the (re)vision of the discipline. She obtained her doctorate from the Programa de Estudios Artísticos, Literarios y Culturales with a specialty in Art History at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, where she presented the first comprehensive study of avant-garde art produced between 1960-1980 in Puerto Rico. She is a professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez and Río Piedras Campus. In addition, she is an independent researcher and curator who has published and presented her exhibitions and articles in various international platforms. She curated SUZI FERRER, the first retrospective exhibition of the groundbreaking feminist avant-garde artist, presently on view at the Museo de Arte y Diseño de Miramar.  She is currently working on publishing a catalogue with contributions from various scholars which will accompany an upcoming traveling SUZI FERRER exhibition.  

Shenouda Rizkalla is a trained archaeologist with extensive experience in archaeological fieldwork, database and collections management, and community outreach. His current research focus is the museum’s role in preserving the local community identity, applied to the content and display of the Sharm El-Sheikh museum and build up a sustainable community outreach program by engaging the local population with the collection and relate the results to wider discussions of repatriation and post-colonial heritage management in Egypt. Rizkalla is an Egyptology PhD graduate from Helwan University-Egypt. His research to date has been diverse, working on recording and translating Ptolemaic Period hieroglyphics, creating and executing site management strategies, and addressing the looting of archaeological sites. He is a member of many excavations and site management missions inside Egypt since 2012. He has many Presentations and Invited Talks, Academic Reports and Publications.   

Nsima Stanislaus Udo is a Nigerian and an Africanist scholar.  He completed his BA in History and International Relations in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He then proceeded to South Africa where he completed his Honors and MA degrees (cum laude) at the University the Western Cape in Visual History and Theory. He lives in Cape Town and is a doctoral candidate at the University of the Western Cape. His research interest is in African cultural studies: in thinking around visual representations, histories and meanings of African cultural and festival practices. His doctoral research is currently looking at the history of Calabar Festival and Carnival, Nigeria. He is exploring the multiple-layered cultural, visual, aesthetic, economic and secular representations of this complex and elaborate festival. Nsima Stanislaus Udo presently serves as a teaching and research assistant at the Faculty of Art in the same university.  

John Kelechi Ugwuanyi is a senior lecturer and the coordinator of postgraduate studies in the Department of Archaeology and Tourism, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He had his PhD in heritage studies at the University of York and MA and BA in Archaeology and Tourism at the University of Nigeria. His research interest is critical heritage studies, museum, indigenous knowledge systems, tourism, and contemporary archaeology. He is the co-editor of Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies and sits on the editorial board of the Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory book series published by the Archaeopress in Oxford as part of the British Archaeological Report series of monograph. Kelechi has published in national and international journals of repute. He is a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and a recipient of other scholarship/grant including the Overseas Research Scholarship of the University of York, UK. 

Elizabeth Catoia Varela holds a PhD in History and Criticism of Art from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2016). She worked at the Research and Documentation Center of the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro – MAM Rio (2009-2021). Her dissertation was published as a book in 2017 (Concrete Art Beyond Europe: Brazil, Argentina and the MAM Rio). She published other three books about the history of the museum. Varela was the curator of the exhibition “MAM: its history, its heritage” (2013-2016). She was awarded in 2020 with the AAM-Getty International Program/American Alliance of Museums and is a member of the College Art Association (CAA) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM).  

PARTICIPATING ALUMNI 

Nadhra Shahbaz Khan is Associate Professor of Art History and the Director of the Gurmani Centre for Languages & Literature at LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan. A specialist in the history of art and architecture of the Punjab from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, Dr. Khan’s research covers the visual and material culture of the region during the Mughal, Sikh, and colonial periods. Her interest lies in investigating levels of human agency behind artefacts and architectural spaces, both as creators and consumers to understand their political, religious and socio-economic ambitions at different historical intersections. Her publications, conference papers and other research activities spread over more than a decade, especially her book titled Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samādhi in Lahore: A Summation of Sikh Architectural and Decorative Practices has successfully brought Sikh art and architecture to the forefront of Pakistan’s heritage discussions and conservation activities.    

Halyna Kohut is an associate professor in the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine, where she teaches history of art, contemporary art, feminist art, and history of theatrical costume. Educated as an artist, she received her Ph.D. from the Lviv National Academy of Arts. Kohut is the CAA-Getty International Program alumna and a recipient of scholarships and grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Austrian Agency for International Mobility and Cooperation, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, and the Queen Jadwiga Foundation at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Kohut specializes in eighteenth-century East European carpets and kilims. Her most recent research interest focus on woman art in Soviet Ukraine. She is especially interested in how ideology informed the identities of women artists and how they challenged that ideology with their art practices.  

Irena Kossowska graduated from the Warsaw University in 1980. She obtained a Ph.D. degree and Habilitation at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in 1990 and 2001 respectively. Currently she is Full Professor of Art History at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, and at the Polish Institute of World Art Studies in Warsaw. She specializes in the field of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual arts, art theory, and criticism. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the Bogliasco Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, National Humanities Center, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Henry Moore Institute, and the British Academy. She has written extensively on Polish and European art, including Artistic Reconquest: Art in Interwar Poland and Europe, The Search for Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe 1919-2014, Symbolism and Young Poland; Reinterpreting the Past: Traditionalist Artistic Trends in Central and Eastern Europe of the 1920s and 1930s; and The Beginnings of Polish Original Printmaking 1897-1917. 

Ana Mannarino is an art historian and a professor of art history in the School of Fine Arts and the Visual Arts Postgraduate Program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where she received her PhD in history of arts and visual arts. Her research focuses on Brazilian modern and contemporary art, particularly on the relationship between text and image, art and poetry, and the production of artists’ books.