Keynote Speaker

Jennie Hirsh (Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Columbia Universities, as well as pre-doctoral fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright commission, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Wolfsonian FIU. Hirsh teaches courses on modern and contemporary art and architecture as well as postwar cinema, museum studies, and holocaust studies.

Director of MICA’s Summer Travel Intensive in Venice, Italy, Dr. Hirsh is an expert on modern and contemporary Italian art, architecture, and design, and especially the history of exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale from its establishment in 1895 to the present. Her publications include Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Ashgate, 2011) and Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art (forthcoming, Routledge, 2023), both co-edited with Isabelle Wallace, as well as numerous essays on artists and filmmakers including Giorgio de Chirico, Jean-Luc Godard, Félix González-Torres, Giorgio Morandi, Roberto Rossellini, Soledad Salamé, Yinka Shonibare, and Regina Silveira. Her monographic study of the classical tradition as figured in self-representation in the painting and writing of Giorgio de Chirico is in final preparation.

Panelists

Lily Allen is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in American art at the University of California, Riverside who grew up and resides in Los Angeles. Her presentation relates to her dissertation research, which explores the pan-Pacific social and artistic milieu of Los Angeles in the 1920s and 30s, and the modernist painting that arose from it, through the lives and works of artists Benji Okubo, Hideo Date, Mabel Alvarez, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. She has a BA in art history from New York University, an MA from UC Riverside, and has worked at The Huntington Library Art Museum, Art in America magazine, and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery.

Ingrid Asplund is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California San Diego, where she studies modern and contemporary American art, especially installations employing light, fiber art, decorative arts, and other experimental media. She received her bachelor’s degree in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College. She is researching the stained glass windows of Louis Comfort Tiffany as well as artists of the Light and Space movement such as James Turrell. Her research finds grounding in the themes of spirituality, colonization, and gender in art. Ingrid’s undergraduate thesis, an exploration of textile arts as a modern medium, was published in the inaugural issue of University of California Santa Cruz’s Refract Journal. Ingrid was the recipient of the UCSD Visual Arts Department Qualifying Exam fellowship in 2021 and the Russell Grant in 2022. She volunteers as a birth doula with UCSD hospital’s Hearts & Hands program.

Brittney Bailey is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University. Her research is focused on gender and identity politics in the late nineteenth century. Her forthcoming dissertation, which leverages the French animalier Rosa Bonheur’s painterly encounter with the American showman “Buffalo Bill” to explore the artist’s role in the transnational construction of fin de siècle masculinity, is on track to be completed in the spring of 2024. She received her Bachelor’s in English Literature from Linfield University in 2009 and her Master’s in Art History from American University in 2015. She has held internships at the Portland Art Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts and has served on the faculty of Rutgers University, Moore College of Art and Design, and George Fox University in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where she is currently based.

Maggie Chen comes from the Master in Design Studies program at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she concentrates her studies on Art, Design, and the Public Domain. Her research lies in the intersection of media, technology, and their impacts on our public and private lives. She is particularly interested in exploring personal identities and human connections in a technology-driven world through research and other mediums of expression. With a B.A. in Economics and a minor in Public Policy from UC Berkeley, Maggie brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her research, grounded in the social sciences, to provide a deep understanding of human experiences in larger systems.

Sarah Hutcheson (she/they) is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning at Harvard University. Primarily focused on the intersection of political structure and the built environment in early modern Britain, Sarah’s dissertation work looks at royal space and the king’s body after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Sarah holds a master’s degree in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in history from Vassar College. Sarah’s dissertation research is supported by a Krupp dissertation fellowship from the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and she is currently living in London with her dog Earl Greyhound.

Austen Leigh LaRocca is a Ph.D. Candidate at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Austen examines the global ancient; her research combines Art History and Heritage Studies to look at the way in which ancient art objects are received in modern cultural contexts, particularly that of conflict. Her dissertation Arches & Memory: A Diachronic View of Roman Material Culture, is scheduled for defense in March. Austen received an MA in Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York City. Her excavation experience includes sites throughout the Mediterranean region including Selinunte, Sicily and Aphrodisias, Turkey. Austen is also an enthusiastic community college professor, teaching classes at institutions across the state of New Jersey.

Kristianne Molina (Kate), born in the Philippines and raised in Jersey City — is a Filipino-American artist, educator, and writer. She received her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University New Brunswick and an MA in Critical Theory and the Arts at the School of Visual Arts, New York. As a graduate student in University of California, San Diego’s Art History, Theory, and Criticism Ph.D. program, Kristianne’s research revolves around decolonization, highlighting indigenous and black and brown bodies within historical narratives with a focus on 19th-century art history. Her interdisciplinary art practice is a point of departure to critique history, address climate change from a decolonial and indigenous perspective with a research-based practice on natural dyes, specifically cochineal. She has exhibited artwork in the Philippines, Italy, New York, and New Jersey and worked in various educational settings from low-income to affluent communities.

Morgan Moore is a second-year master’s student in art history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Moore earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from UWM as well. She is primarily interested in the art and architecture of Latin America and Africa. In addition to her pursuits in the field of art history, she works as a research assistant for the Sechín Archaeological Project and the Casma Hinterland Archaeological Project, both of which are based in the Casma Valley of Peru. Moore also holds a research internship position at UWM’s Emile H. Mathis gallery. The presentation Black Power in Medieval Europe: Interpretations of the Saint Maurice Sculpture at Magdeburg Cathedral is adapted from a term paper for a course in Gothic art offered by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Ariana Pemberton is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art department at UC Berkeley, writing her dissertation on South Asian ivory carved objects and the ivory trade of the Indian Ocean world between the eighth and fifteenth centuries CE. Within the field of Medieval South Asian Art History, her interests include trans-regional exchanges across the Indian Ocean, eco-conscious histories of non-human animals and the environment, and the use of materiality-based methodologies. As such, she has designed and taught a lecture course titled “Bronze, Ivory, and Dragon’s Blood: Making the Middle Ages in the Indian Ocean World.” In 2022, Ariana completed her MA thesis on the Firuz Minar, a brick and basalt minaret built in Bengal during the fifteenth century, and today stands as the oldest extant monument in India patronized by an African ruler. She plans to begin fieldwork for her dissertation this coming academic year.

Nadia Spaziani is a Toronto-based researcher with an interest in Classical and Hellenistic Greek Art. She currently explores how mythoi functioned and influenced the lives of the Greek populace. By isolating specific figures and exploring their uses in iconography, worship, and performance her research seeks to garner a richer understanding of the Grecian people and their ideologies. Her primary focus is on the female figures, both divine and mortal, within mythoi as well as the concept of the Greek Hero. Her methodologies involve the study of material, literary, and performative culture along with archeological evidence to ground the prevalence and importance of these ideas to the Grecian populace of the time.

CoCo Tin is a writer/researcher and architectural designer from Hong Kong. She is currently pursuing a post-professional Master in Design ’23 at Harvard Graduate School of Design and holds a Bachelor of Architecture with minor in Art History from Cornell University. She has worked for international studios, including 2×4, OMA, and Collective. In addition to editorial and teaching, her multimedia work focuses on bridging East-West, feminist architectures, decolonial ecologies, and oceanic narratives, closing the nature culture binary. CoCo has been published in Informa peer-reviewed journal, Princeton’s Rumor Review, Cornell Journal of Architecture, DISC magazine, amongst others. Her forthcoming book is tentatively titled, A Healthier Place: The Nature(s) of Sanatoria. www.coco-tin.com

Hanneke van Deursen is a Masters in Design Studies: Narratives candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Before coming to the GSD, she received her Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University School of Architecture. At Syracuse, her award-winning thesis looked at spaces that emerged out of deregulatory and neoliberal policy environments. Hudson Yards (New York), Canary Wharf (London), and Kop van Zuid (Rotterdam) became strange sites of fascination as she spent days inside each development shooting ethnographic films. The films opened up a study of the everyday, which serves as an essential counterpart to the larger ideological and political forces which shape the built environment. At the GSD, Hanneke has been developing the initial observations from her thesis as she is exposed to new research methods and ideas in the MDes program. Her paper, Skyline City, tells the story of the Kop van Zuid in Rotterdam and the role architecture played in conjuring the myth of a metropolis.
A first-generation American, Hanneke grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, and frequently returned to the Netherlands to visit friends, family, and sites of intrigue.