MEET THE TEAM
Edward J. Sullivan has been a professor at New York University for much of his professional career. He currently serves as Deputy Director and Helen Gould Sheppard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts. His interests are broad and include arts and visual cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese world on both sides of the Atlantic and into the Pacific region (especially the Philippines). He has authored many books and articles on art in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, and other countries, but his most significant interest in the cross-border and cross-cultural dialogue between art and intellectual worlds. He has also served as an independent curator for exhibitions of the arts of the Americas in museums in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S.
Chloë Courtney is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She studies the modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with particular interests in decolonial thinking, ecology, and craft theory. Her master’s thesis investigated the contentious history of water in the Valley of Mexico, focusing on the collaborative, research-based projects of artists Maria Thereza Alves, Carlos Huitzil, and Ehécatl Morales. She earned a dual BA in Art History and English Literature from Auburn University in 2015, and her MA in Art History from the University of New Mexico in 2018. In 2016, Chloë received a US Department of Education FLAS fellowship for Portuguese language study and recently served as the 2019-2020 McDermott Graduate Intern for Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Joseph Shaikewitz is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, where they study twentieth-century art and its intersections with feminist, queer, and trans practices. Their dissertation, “Incongruent, Incomprehensible: Travesti-Trans Aesthetic Imaginings in Latin America, 1900–1960,” charts a visual history of gender-variant life and self-imagining in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Havana. Prior to joining the IFA, Joseph was a Curatorial Assistant for the Arts of the Americas and Europe at the Brooklyn Museum.
Shannah Rose is a Ph.D. student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she is a recipient of the Robert Lehman Fellowship for Studies in the Fine Arts and the Robert Chambers Memorial Fellowship. She holds an MA in Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane University (2019) and a BA in Art History and BFA in Printmaking from the University of Virginia (2016). She is also on track to complete an MA in Italian Literature at Middlebury College’s Language Schools. Her research focuses on the visual culture of late medieval and early modern Italy, Spain, and colonial Latin America, with a particular emphasis on the circulation of manuscripts, prints, and books. Her research has been funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura New York. Prior to beginning her graduate studies, Shannah taught English as a second language with the Académie de Toulouse in Cahors, France as part of a joint initiative by the French Ministry of Education and the Centre international d’études pédagogiques (CIEP).
Corey Loftus is a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She studies Modern and Contemporary Art of the Americas with geographic interests in Cuba and Mexico. Corey’s work focuses on women artists engaging feminist, queer, and disability studies to question the constantly negotaiated experience of being in a body. Prior to her graduate studies at the Institute, Corey received her MA in the History of Art at Tufts University and BA at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she has also worked as a Curatorial Fellow at the Asheville Art Museum and in various roles at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tatiana Marcel is a third-year MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Latin American art, Dada, and Surrealism, with a focus on Latin American Surrealism. At the Institute, she co-curated the exhibition Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos and co-organized the Seventh Annual Symposium of Latin American Art: “Making Space, Making Place: Marking the Americas.” Prior to her graduate studies at the Institute, Tatiana worked at David Zwirner as an Artist Liaison and Sales Assistant. She earned a BA in Art History and Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University. During college, she held positions at Christie’s and Gagosian.
Cristalina Parra is an MA candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, where she studies twentieth-century art in the Southern Cone of the Americas with a special interest in textile work and concrete poetry. Her research focuses on Chilean artist Violeta Parra, arpilleras, and Surrealism. She is interested in charting connections between twentieth-century self-taught female artists working on textiles between Chile, Mexico City, Algeria, and Egypt. Prior to joining the IFA, Cristalina completed her BA in Art History at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Past Collaborators
Alejandra López-Oliveros is a second-year master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, focusing on the contemporary art of the Americas. Her research interests include photography, critical theory, and intersectional feminism. She holds an MA in Art Museums and Gallery Studies from the University of Leicester, England, and a BA in Art History from the University of Granada, Spain. In 2019, Alejandra received the Fulbright Fellowship and in 2021 she received La Caixa Fellowship and the Art Table Fellowship. She has previously worked at Project for Empty Space in Newark, the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, and the Center for Art on Migration Politics in Copenhagen.
Jason Drill is a second-year MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. His research interests include the development of modernisms in the U.S. and Latin America, with a particular interest in moments of artistic and cultural exchange. He received a BA from Hampshire College in 2018, and he is currently preparing a thesis on the politics of abstraction in the work of Mark Bradford.
Martina Lentino is a second-year MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts focusing on modern and contemporary Art of the Americas. Her research interests focus on photography, critical theory, and global/transatlantic exchange. She earned her B.A. with general and departmental Honors from the University of Chicago, where she double-majored in Art History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Martina has held internships at Christie’s and at the Smart Museum of Art, and was Kress Interpretive Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar is a Ph.D. student in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He focuses on Modern Latin American Art and artistic exchanges between Latin America and Europe. His master’s thesis explored the artistic production of the Colombian artist Marco Tobón Mejía during his residence in France. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Juan Gabriel received his B.A. in History at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. In 2013, he obtained an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship to study at the master’s program in Comparative History at Charles University in Prague, and Social Sciences at the École des Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales in Paris. At the Institute, he makes part of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Lapis: The Journal of the Institute of Fine Arts.
Francesca Ferrari is a Ph.D. Candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she is a recipient of the Robert Lehman Fellowship for Studies in the Fine Arts. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Art History and English from the Université de Lausanne. Her research focuses on twentieth-century European and Latin American art. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Animated Geometries: Abstraction and the Body in the Work of Paul Klee, Sophie Taeuber, Joaquín Torres-García, and Alexandra Exter,” explores the convergence of geometric abstraction, the human body, and movement on a transnational scale during the 1920s. She has published in several graduate art history journals, as well as Afterimage and the Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin. Francesca is the 2020/2021 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.
Brian Bentley is a Ph.D. candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where his research focuses on Modern and contemporary art of the Americas, new media, and art as activism. Brian is currently writing a dissertation on Brazilian New Figuration in the 1960s. He is the recipient of the IFA Connoisseurs Circle Fellowship and holds an M.A. from the IFA and a B.A. Honours from McGill University. He was previously Curatorial Assistant at the Brooklyn Museum in the Arts of the Americas & Europe Department and Graduate Curatorial Assistant at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. He has held research roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His writing appears in Paulo Bruscky: Artist Books and Films, 1970-2013 (Another Space, 2015), and he was a panelist in the 2015 Latin American Forum event “A Dialogue with Antonio Diaz.”
Madeline Murphy Turner is a Ph.D. Candidate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she focuses on modern and contemporary art from Latin America. Born in New York City, she received her B.A. in Art History from Bard College and her M.A. from the Institute in 2015. Her dissertation examines women performance artists in Mexico in the 1970s and ’80s. Madeline is currently the Graduate Curatorial Assistant at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and previously worked with the Cecilia de Torres Gallery and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. She has taught courses on various subjects in NYU’s Department of Art History and Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions.