Release Date: September 28, 2018

National Gallery of Art Awards Eleven Fellowships and Internships to Emerging Leaders in the Museum Profession

Front row, left to right: Ariana Chaivaranon, Amanda Hilliam, Jen Munch, and Alec Aldrich; Back row, left to right: Diana Greenwald, Marion Lavaux, Kyle Swartzlender, Zach Feldman, and Ashely E. Williams; Not pictured: Kara Fiedorek and Manon Lecaplain

Washington, DC—The National Gallery of Art welcomed eleven emerging professionals to participate in its 2018–2019 fellowship and graduate internship program. The group was selected after a competitive application process and includes individuals from seven states and three foreign countries.

Graduate Curatorial Internships at the National Gallery of Art provide in-depth training for advanced PhD students and recent PhD recipients interested in gaining curatorial experience in a museum setting. Interns work with curators on permanent collection and exhibition projects. Internships in the Museum Profession at the National Gallery of Art provide institutional training to students interested in pursuing a museum career. Working closely with professional staff at the Gallery, interns participate in the ongoing work of a department.

Interns are chosen after a rigorous application process based on a strong interest in museum work, outstanding academic achievement, and letters of recommendation, among other criteria. As part of their regular work schedule, interns attend a biweekly seminar that introduces them to the broad spectrum of museum work at the Gallery, including departments, staff, functions, and programs.

The internship program is supported by individual gifts and endowment funds, and is administered by the department of academic programs in the division of education. Information about the Gallery's internships and fellowships is available at nga.gov/interns or by calling (202) 842-6257.

2018–2019 National Gallery of Art Fellows and Interns

Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellows (2018–2020)
Kara Fiedorek
New York, New York
Fiedorek has a BA (art history) from Yale University and a PhD (art history) from New York University. Her dissertation is titled "Priests of the Sun: Photography and Faith, 1860–1910." She has been a Connoisseurs Circle Fellow at NYU and a Junior Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. As a curatorial assistant in photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Fiedorek curated exhibitions such as Cuban Photography after 1980; Focus on Joel Sternfeld; India through the Camera's Eye; and a survey on the history of photography from its invention to the present day. She has worked at NYU's Grey Art Gallery and in the Photography Collection at the New York Public Library, in addition to writing catalog essays, artist biographies, and exhibition reviews for various publications. Fiedorek is working on multiple exhibitions for the department of photographs, including curating Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project, cocurating a permanent collection rotation in the American modernism galleries, and conducting research on the Gallery's collection of postwar British photography.

Diana Greenwald
New York, New York
Greenwald completed a BA (art history) at Columbia University and an MA (economic and social history) and PhD (history) from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation, "Painting by Numbers: Case Studies in the Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Landscape and Rural Genre Painting," is under contract for publication with Princeton University Press. Greenwald has been a Wiener-Anspach Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow for Economic History at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, a junior fellow at The Frick Collection's Center for the History of Collecting, a visiting PhD scholar in the art history and archaeology department at Columbia University, and a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Greenwald has articles forthcoming in issues of The Economic History Review and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. This year Greenwald will continue assisting in the department of American and British paintings with research and planning related to an upcoming exhibition on John Singer Sargent. She is also assisting the department of modern prints and drawings with research on works in the collection by the self-taught artist James Castle.

Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation Curatorial Intern
Amanda Hilliam
London, England
Hilliam received a BA (history of art) from the University of Bristol and an MA (history of art and visual culture) from the University of Oxford. She is currently pursuing a collaborative PhD (history, philosophy and culture) with Oxford Brookes University and the National Gallery in London. Her thesis is "Beyond Painting: The Celestial Fictions of Carlo Crivelli." Hilliam was selected to participate in the 2018–2019 Study of 16th-Century Italian Drawings workshop and traveling seminars organized by the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett and supported by a major grant from the Getty Foundation. Previously she worked at Sotheby's London as a department assistant in old master drawings. Hilliam was also a curatorial intern at Watts Gallery, Compton, and the National Portrait Gallery, London. This year she will assist the department of prints and drawings with research for an upcoming exhibition.

Interns in the Museum Profession
Alec Aldrich
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
Aldrich received a BA (art history) from Vassar College and an MA (art history) from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Previously Aldrich interned in the prints and drawings departments at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During the summer of 2017 he was the International Fine Print Dealers Association fellow in the department of prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Aldrich will spend the first part of the year assisting the department of Northern Baroque paintings with permanent collection research. His work will include augmenting curatorial files related to Dutch and Flemish painting accessions from the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In the spring, he will assist curators in the department of old master prints and drawings.

Jen Munch
Somerville, Massachusetts
Munch received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and is currently pursuing an MA with a certificate of advanced study (art conservation) at Buffalo State, the State University of New York. Munch has held an impressive number of conservation internships and fellowships. During the summer of 2017 she was a paintings conservation intern at the Phillips Collection. This year, Munch is assisting the department of painting conservation with the treatment of European and American paintings, general collection care, and examination and documentation for loans from the permanent collection to other institutions.

Kyle Swartzlender
Austin, Texas
Swartzlender received a BA (art history) from the University of Oregon and an MS (information science) and a certificate (museum studies) from the University of Texas at Austin. Previously Swartzlender was a preparator and gallery assistant at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco. Most recently he was a circulation supervisor at the Fine Arts Library at the University of Texas Libraries in Austin. This year Swartzlender is assisting with planning and implementing the relocation and reorganization of rare collections in the department of image collections as well as cataloging and digitizing parts of the David Finn Archive.

The John Wilmerding Intern in Digital Interpretation
Zachary Feldman
Sandy Springs, Georgia
Feldman received a BA (German studies and arts and ideas in the humanities) from the University of Michigan and an MA (German studies) from Vanderbilt University where he is currently pursuing a joint PhD (comparative media analysis and practice and German studies). He has been the recipient of the Vanderbilt Institute of Digital Learning (VIDL) 2017–2018 Fellowship and most recently was a research assistant for the media studies team on Genetic Privacy and Identity in Community Settings (GetPreCiSe). This year Feldman will work on a number of projects related to digital interpretation at the Gallery, including supporting research, workshops, and interviews with thought leaders in the field and helping plan for a new digital interface to serve multigenerational audiences.

The John Wilmerding Intern in American Art
Ashley E. Williams
Austin, Texas
Williams received a BA (art history, minor in French) from Agnes Scott College and an MA (art history) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a 2018 recipient of the John G. Thorpe Young Professionals and Students Fellowship from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. Previously Williams was a graduate intern in museum studies at Newport Restoration Foundation and a European paintings research intern at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to museum work, Williams was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Morocco. This year Williams is assisting in planning and research for an upcoming exhibition and publication devoted to James McNeill Whistler.

Dumbarton Oaks Humanities Fellow
Ariana Chaivaranon
Arlington, Virginia
Chaivaranon recently received a BA (visual and environmental studies, minor in history of art and architecture) from Harvard College. As a college student she was the artist's assistant to Tania Bruguera and a student guide at the Harvard Art Museums. In the summer of 2017 Chaivaranon was the Ayesha Bulchandani Undergraduate Education Intern at The Frick Collection, New York. As a Dumbarton Oaks Humanities Fellow, she will split her time between the research institute and the Gallery. This year Chaivaranon is working on a variety of education division activities, including community programs, high school workshops, and Art Around the Corner mini multiple visits.

2-Month Graduate Interns
Marion Lavaux
Vincennes, France
Lavaux received a BA from École nationale des chartes and an MA (history) from Université Paris-Sorbonne and École nationale des chartes. Previously, Lavaux interned at Musée d'Orsay and Centre des Monuments Nationaux, Paris. She is in residence August through mid-October assisting with research for the upcoming exhibition Degas at the Opera.

Manon Lecaplain
Montreuil, France
Lecaplain received a BA (literature and history) from Université de Toulouse. As an undergraduate, she studied abroad at Sapienza Università di Roma on the Erasmus scholarship program. Recently she received an MA (history) from Université Paris-Sorbonne and École nationale des chartes. Lecaplain has interned at Médiathèque de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Charenton, France, and Centre National d'Art et de Culture George Pompidou, Paris. She will be in residence from January to March, working in the department of photographs.

Press Contact:
Christina Brown, (202) 842-6598 or [email protected]