Student Speakers

Mew Lingjun Jiang is a PhD Candidate at the University of Oregon. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Arts Degree from the University of Chicago. Previously, Mew interned at the Guangzhou Museum of Art, China, for Japanese and Chinese painting exhibitions and worked as a translator for a Japanese print exhibition in Shanghai. Currently, Mew studies the creativity of play, the reinterpretation of signs, and the meaning-making of images in early modern Japanese art. She is writing her doctoral thesis on Tenshō karuta European-patterned Japanese playing cards and their cultural repositioning in the early modern to modern period. Mew is a student member of the Japan Art History Forum and the Association for Asian Studies. Mew had residential fellowships at the Harvard Art Museums and the Japan Foundation Kansai Center. 

Grace completed her MA degree in art history at Lindenwood University in October 2023. In her time there, she researched the city murals of Teotihuacan for her master’s thesis, published two research papers in the Lindenwood Confluence journal, studied abroad in Paris, France, and was accepted into the Kappa Pi International Art Honor Society. She has a passion for art history and a strong academic record. She graduated with honors and received the Outstanding Art History Student award from Webster University, where she completed her BA degree in the same field. Prior to her graduate studies, she gained valuable experience as a Gallery Assistant Intern at the local Bruno David Gallery, where she assisted in setting up and taking down exhibitions and learned methods for safe transportation of art pieces. Before then, she worked in a St. Louis-based custom framing shop and art restoration studio, where she was able to assist in restoring multi-media pieces, such as an African Yoruba beaded chair and WWII era telegrams. She aspires to work in an art museum in a position where she can apply her skills in art handling, writing, and research. 

Alexandra is a third-year PhD Student at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her research interests include Latin American conceptual art and social practice, particularly as they address the intersection of human and environmental rights. She earned her MA with distinction from the University of Glasgow and graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University. She has presented at domestic and international conferences, including the Association for Latin American Art Triennial, the Latin American Studies Association Congress, and upcoming at the Clark Art Institute Graduate Student Symposium. She has curated exhibitions of Latin American art in New York, Miami, and Mexico City and is currently a curatorial consultant for the exhibition Transgresoras: Mail Art & Messages, 1960s-2020s, which will open at the UC Riverside Museum of Photography in 2025. 

Nicole Kitsberg is currently a History of Art graduate student at The Institute of Fine Arts, where her research focuses on issues pertaining to Holocaust memorialization. Her research resides at the intersection of art history, museum studies, and memory studies. She graduated from the University of Oxford last year, where she was awarded The Gibbs Prize for the highest achievement in her cohort, along with the university-wide prize for best thesis. Originally from London, she has worked at The Royal Academy of Arts, Christie’s and The Ashmolean Museum, as well as curating an exhibition at The Stanley Spencer Gallery. 

After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 2022, Annabelle is currently in the final semester of their Art History Masters program at American University. Their broad interest in Queer Art has led them to study both Modern European and American Contemporary art. Annabelle’s Master’s capstone project is focused on ideas of Lesbian Visibility in the later twentieth century through the study of Joan E. Biren’s work, The Dyke Show. In the future, they hope to focus on queer and transgender self representation in art. Following their passion for the sharing of knowledge, Annabelle currently interns in the library at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and hopes to pursue a similar career moving forward.

Cléa Massiani is a French curator and art professional. She is the founder and co-director of Bass and Reiner Gallery, located at the Minnesota Street Project complex in San Francisco, a curatorial space dedicated to foster dynamic dialogues in the Bay Area art scene and emerging artists. Massiani has curated and co-curated exhibitions in major museums and galleries and held professional art positions both in Europe and the United States. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in History and Art History from The Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and an M.A. in Exhibition and Museum Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, focusing on Outsider Art and
Disability in Visual Studies.

Mekayla May (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, studying Roman art and archaeology under Dr. Maryl B. Gensheimer; she completed her Master’s from UMD in May 2023, where her thesis examined the mutability and context of marble double-sided reliefs suspended in the intercolumniations of Roman domestic peristyles and atria called oscilla. Her research interests include domestic decoration and space, ancient experience, and recontextualizing ancient objects as used objects, especially as tools in social interactions. Mekayla is also a field archaeologist, working as part of the American Excavations Samothrace team in northern Greece, where she is studying the Roman occupation and transformation of the Hellenistic religious sanctuary, the Sanctuary of the Great Gods. Mekayla is also a part of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae project at UMD, studying spatial relationships and the wall paintings in the Villa Arianna.  

Colton Klein is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art at Yale University, where he studies the visual culture of the United States with a focus on material and environmental histories. He previously worked as a curatorial assistant in prewar art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he collaborated on exhibitions including Henry Taylor: B Side (2023–24), Edward Hopper’s New York (2022–23), At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism (2022–23), and Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930–1950 (2021–22), and as the project manager of the Marsden Hartley catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Bates College Museum of Art. Colton is a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities at Yale and a graduate of Columbia University’s MA program in Art History.

Lauren Whitaker is an artist and art historian currently pursuing her M.A. in art history at the University of South Florida. Her research is shaped by a fascination with materiality and the illumination of human history, culture, and connection through the life of artworks. Through following these threads of interest, she has found a particular focus on Islamic art as well as topics of gender and sexuality. She is driven by her love of discovering new understandings of life and art through close research. Lauren is passionate about art education and hopes to pursue a career that allows her to facilitate a love of knowledge and appreciation for art in others.