PhD CANDIDATES

 

Below is a partial (and growing!) list of PhD Candidates in the Art History Department.. Complete the contact form to add your bio to this page. For a full list of dissertations through 2017  in progress, click here.

Leslie Anderson is a PhD Candidate in Art History and the Curator of European, American, and Regional Art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Her dissertation examines the depiction of artistic practice in 19th-century Denmark. Funding for her research includes a Fulbright grant, an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship, and a CUNY Chancellor’s Fellowship. She has published articles in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and Rutgers Art Review, and presented papers at the IFA-Frick Symposium and the College Art Association. Previously, Anderson-Perkins was a Curatorial Assistant and the Kress Interpretive Fellow at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. She held internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Denmark. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Parsons the New School for Design, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, and the University of Indianapolis.

Karen Barber is a PhD Candidate in Art History, specializing in the history of photography. Her dissertation explores cameraless photography and its narrative in the 1920s. She has curated a range of exhibitions, presented papers, and written for a variety of museum and photography publications. Her fellowships include the William and Elizabeth Patterson Curatorial Fellowship in Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Ralph M. Parsons Curatorial Fellowship in Photographic Studies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and her current fellowship in Photography at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Elizabeth DeRose is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center in New York. Her areas of specialization include Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art and 20th century printmaking. She is currently working on her dissertation Defying Graphic Tradition: Printmaking Strategies of Latin American Conceptualists (1963 – 1984). Prior to coming to the Graduate Center Ms. DeRose was the Florence B. Selden Assistant Curator in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Yale University Art Gallery. While there she curated two exhibitions: Jasper Johns: From Plate to Print and Making a Mark: Four Contemporary Artists in Print.

Randall Edwards is a PhD Candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is currently writing his dissertation, “Dennis Oppenheim: Sites, 1967-75,” for which he was awarded a Henry Luce Foundation/ ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. Edwards has published in The Burlington Magazine and Sculpture Journal, and is a contributing essayist to The Art of Handwriting (Exh. cat., Archives of American Art/ Princeton Architectural Press, 2015). In addition to holding curatorial appointments at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Dia Art Foundation, he has taught at The City College of New York and Baruch College.

Media Farzin is a PhD Candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, whose research focuses on language-based art of the 1960s and 70s, especially issues of representation and distribution, such as exhibitions, photographic documentation, ephemera, and props.  She is completing her dissertation, titled “Theater, Artifice, and Opacity: Guy de Cointet and 1970s Performance” with Professor Siona Wilson. She has published extensively on contemporary art, and a collaborative art project with Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, on cultural diplomacy and its modernist artifacts, has been exhibited in numerous venues internationally.  She teaches at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Michelle Millar Fisher is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Curatorial Assistant in the Architecture + Design department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is currently also a Part-Time Lecturer at Parsons The New School for Design and is an invited lecturer at the Frick. She is also the co-founder of ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org, a Kress-funded website that fosters peer-led, open access pedagogical exchange in art history teaching. Her research centers on social histories of architecture, contemporary art, museums, and the pedagogical turn, and her dissertation is titled “Nothing is Transmissible but Thought”: Le Corbusier’s Radiant City in Diaspora.” She is currently co-editing a book on collaboration in the visual arts and architecture, to be published by Courtauld Books Online in 2015.

Cybèle Gontar is a PhD Candidate in American art and Predoctoral Fellow at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where she is completing her dissertation “José Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza and Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans: Portraiture, Identity, and Plantation Society in New Orleans, 1780-1880.” She has published in Common-place, The Interactive Journal of Early American Life and Metropolitan Museum Journal, and is a principal author of Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835 (2010). She specializes in the art and material culture of the Gulf South; current curatorial projects include a catalogue about José Salazar (c. 1750-1802), who produced portraits in Spanish colonial New Orleans between 1785 and 1802. Article / Academia.edu

Natalie Musteata is completing her dissertation on the post-war history of artist-curated exhibitions with Claire Bishop and David Joselit. She writes regularly for artforum.com, and is a nominee for the Bonaldi Art Prize for curatorial innovation. Her past exhibitions include UNREST: Revolt against Reason, apexart, 2012, and if I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution, Haverford College, 2014. She has taught several classes on contemporary art with a focus on performance art history and social practice at the New School, and organized conferences and presented papers on exhibition history and socially-engaged art for such institutions as Centre Georges Pompidou, The Vera List Center for Art & Politics, College Art Association, and The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center. http://www.nataliemusteata.com/

Amy Raffel is a PhD candidate in Art History at The CUNY Graduate Center and is interested in artists’ use of marketing, merchandise and the mass media, and will focus on Keith Haring’s Pop Shop in her dissertation. She holds an Enhanced Chancellor’s Fellowship and has taught at Lehman College for the past four years. She earned her BA with honors from Penn State in 2007, completed her MA at the Institute of Fine Arts in 2010, and her M. Phil from the Graduate Center in 2013. She also works as a Genome Contributor for Artsy and editor for Art History Teaching Resources. 

Lauren Rosati is a PhD Candidate in Art History where she is completing her dissertation on sound, machines, and the inter-war avant-garde with Emily Braun and David Grubbs. She has curated exhibitions, organized conferences, and presented papers internationally on sound, new media, and performance for Exit Art; the Goethe-Institut; Columbia University; and the Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, Germany, among others. She is currently the Director of ((audience)), a non-profit presentation organization for sound art and experimental music, and a Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art.