We are proud of the many museum directors, non-profit administrators, researchers and scholars working in the arts and humanities and contributing to their fields. We encourage alumni to stay in touch, and many volunteer their time to support current undergraduate and graduate students through field study, and other mentoring opportunities.
Please email carina_haden@brown.edu with news.
Here is a select list of our alumni:
Sarah Rovang is an academic architectural historian turned independent curator and writer. Her article, How John Deere and Eero Saarinen Inspired Georgia O’Keeffe’s Largest Painting was published in the April 2, 2020 edition of Hyperallergic. In summer 2020, she began working as a Program Officer at the Thoma Foundation in Santa Fe.
Lisa Tom is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Rhode Island. Tom’s research specializes in the visual and material culture of early modern Europe from a global perspective, with an interest in the comparative dynamics between a broad range of media, including paintings, sculptures, prints, medals, numismatics, and illuminated manuscripts.
Tiffany Zabludowicz curates "STRAY," an exhibition that brings together five artists who are re-contextualizing the human body and the ways it is affected in the contemporary technological era. She founded Times Square Space in 2016.
Nathaniel Stein has been appointed Associate Curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2017. His doctoral research dealt with photography in India and Britain in the nineteenth century. He has published and organized exhibitions on internationally-established and emerging contemporary photographers from South Asia, Europe, continental North America, and the Caribbean.
Dr. Mario Pereira is Executive Editor at Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts in South Dartmouth. His two recent book projects include a 2019 translation of Lisbon, A Biography, written by Magda Pinheiro, as well as co-editing Transnational Africas: Visual Material and Sonic Cultures of Lusophone Africa. Tagus Press is a multidisciplinary international studies and outreach publisher dedicated to the study of the language, literatures, and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world.
Sarah Joan Moran is Associate Professor of Early Modern Art History at the University of Utrecht. She studies art and architecture of the Low Countries c.1400-c.1800, the roles of imagery in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, domestic material culture, the monastic tradition, patronage, early modern women, cultural exchange within the Spanish Empire, art and architecture of the New World, early modern print culture.
Professor Rihouet was interviewed in April 2019 at the École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales, where she taught a seminar during the 2019-2020 academic year. In the video interview, at the Villa Medici, Professor Rihouet discusses her Brown/EHESS degree and her research on Roman prints. Her co-edited volume, Eternal Ephemera: The Papal Possesso and its Legacies in Early Modern Rome (Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, University of Toronto Press, 2020) came out in July 2020.
Alexis Lowry is a curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, and a 2022 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. At the Foundation, she is responsible for exhibitions, commissions, and public programs. She has contributed to publications for Art Monthly, The Drawing Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2021, she was the first-invited curator-in-residence at the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany. Prior to her current appointment, she was a curator at the University's David Winton Bell Gallery.
Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, Associate Professor of Art History at California State University, Long Beach, has published her new book, Medieval Art in Motion: The Inventory and Gift Giving of Queen Clémence de Hongrie (Penn State University Press, 2019). She has another book out entitled Moving Women Moving Objects (400-1500) with Brill. Professor Proctor-Tiffany has received the Samuel H. Kress/International Center of Medieval Art book research award and an Andrew W. Mellon Art History Publication Initiative grant.
Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Brown University in 2005, and has since researched and taught in the US, UK and Japan. Her trans-disciplinary work on European Modernism, Russian emigration and book art resulted in the illustrated monograph Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art published by Northwestern University Press in January 2011. While in Tokyo, she became a regular contributor to Artforum, and wrote a blog column in The Huffington Post. In 2017 she began writing for The New Criterion magazine. Her website is www.juliafriedman.org.
Tanya Sheehan is Distinguished Scholar and Director of Research at the Lunder Institute for American Art, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art at Colby College. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018). Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its Origins (2015, with Andres Zervigon), Grove Art Guide to Photography (2017), and Photography and Migration (2018). Her current book project, for which she received a 2019-2020 Boston Medical Library Fellowship in the History of Medicine, examines modernist art by African Americans who have explored black agency through the subjects of medicine and public health. Since 2015 she has served as executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal.
Daniel Harkett is Associate Professor of Art at Colby College, having previously held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and taught at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research focuses on nineteenth-century French art, especially its intersection with cultures of display. He has published essays on topics including the afterlife of art from the French Revolution, the role of art in elite salons, and the exhibition of a giraffe in early nineteenth-century Paris. He has also co-edited, with Katie Hornstein, a book on the artist Horace Vernet titled, Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (2017).
Clare Rogan, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Detroit Institute of Arts, is now Director-at-Large of the Association of Print Scholars from 2020-2023.
Hui-Hung Chen is currently a full professor in the Department of History at National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Her research focuses on the Jesuits and relevant topics, and further explores the issues about European cultural and artistic encounters with non-Europeans, and Christianity in China from the 17th to 19th centuries
Benedict Leca is the executive director of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island. He has published on 18th-century French painting and printmaking and has organized exhibitions such as The World Is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne (2014) at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Suzanne Karr Schmidt is the George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Newberry, Chicago’s Independent Research Library since 1887. Previously, she was the Assistant Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, after holding a postdoctoral Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship there.
Natalia is featured on a number of top designers lists, including House & Garden magazine’s Top 100 Designers. As an architect, she developed a passion for materiality – a devotion she has carried through into her interior architecture and design work for clients in the UK and beyond. Natalia was featured in Architectural Digest in February 2021.
Mary Morton is the Curator and Head of the Department of French Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The former associate curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2004–2010) and associate curator of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Houston (1998–2004), she joined the curatorial staff of the National Gallery of Art in 2010.
Jessica M. Dandona is a Professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art from U.C. Berkeley and specializes in 19th-century French art and visual culture. She has studied at Université de Paris I and the École du Louvre in Paris, and, as a Fulbright Fellow, at Université Laval in Québec. Dr. Dandona’s book Nature and the Nation in Fin-de-Siècle France: The Art of Emile Gallé was published by Routledge in 2017. Her current book project, supported by a USUK Fulbright Scholar fellowship, looks at the history of anatomical illustration in art and medicine at the end of the 19th century.
Bibiana K. Obler ( Ph.D., UC Berkeley), is an associate professor of art history at George Washington University. Her research and teaching interests include European and American art from the late nineteenth century to the present, with emphases on twentieth-century avant-garde, theories of gender and cross-cultural representation, photography, applied arts, and intellectual history. She recently joined the editorial collective of the journal Feminist Studies.
David A. Brenneman was appointed Wilma E. Kelley Director of the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art in 2015. Since arriving at the museum, Brenneman has overseen a number of initiatives, including the $30 million renovation of its I. M. Pei–designed building, which includes an enhanced visitor experience; re-imagined interpretative strategies; and new centers for conservation, curatorial studies, education, and prints, drawings, and photographs.
Timothy R. Rodgers will serve as the Phoenix Art Museum's (PhxArt) new Sybil Harrington Director and CEO beginning in April 2020.
Carter E. Foster is Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. He has held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he is the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing.
Martha Tedeschi (PhD Northwestern University), was appointed Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director at the Harvard Art Museums in July 2016. Prior to her arrival at Harvard, she served as deputy director for art and research at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also enjoyed a long tenure as curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings. A specialist in 19th-century British and American art, Tedeschi has written in particular depth about James McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, and John Marin and has frequently collaborated with conservators and conservation scientists.
Mitchell Merling was the Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts until 2019. He is now an independent scholar.