National Gallery's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Announces 2025–2026 Fellows
2024 staff and fellows, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC—The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center), the National Gallery's world-renowned research institute, announced today its fellows for the 2025–2026 academic year. The 34 fellows' research spans space and time. Their topics include pollution and visual culture in 19th-century Britain; the connections between optics, science, and art in China; and the 20th-century market for Mesoamerican and Central American antiquities, among many others.
Evelyn Lincoln, professor emerita at Brown University and a specialist in the history of print culture in the early modern period, will be the Center's Kress-Beinecke Professor. She will pursue her research on the Parasole family's woodblock illustrations from early 17th-century Rome as well as mentor the predoctoral fellows in residence. Conservator of contemporary art Christian Scheidemann will join the Center as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor and will lead a colloquy on care and repair in conservation. Roland Betancourt, professor of Byzantine art and modern popular culture at the University of California, Irvine, continues his two-year appointment as Andrew W. Mellon Professor.
"We are proud to serve as an incubator for groundbreaking research that will deepen our understanding of art and its connection to our shared humanity," said Steven Nelson, dean of the Center.
A total of 17 senior, postdoctoral, and predoctoral fellows will be in residence at the Center from September to May. Beyond the National Gallery's campus, 11 predoctoral fellows will conduct research in the field. The Center will also support three sabbatical fellowships for National Gallery staff members this year, allowing them to pursue independent study, research, and/or publication. In addition to this list, the Center will announce over a dozen visiting senior fellowships with two-month-long residencies throughout the year.
Center fellows in residence have offices in the National Gallery's East Building. Throughout the academic year, they have opportunities to share their research with peers and the public, and are encouraged to attend lectures, programs, tours, and gallery talks organized by the Center. All of the Center's fellowships are made possible by the generous support of private benefactors.
About the Center
Since its inception in 1979 with the opening of the National Gallery's East Building, the Center has promoted the study of the production, use, and cultural meaning of art, artifacts, architecture, urbanism, photography, and film from all places and periods through the formation of a community of scholars. In selecting its fellows, the Center seeks to broaden scholarship in the visual arts. More information about the Center's fellowships can be found here.
Academic Year Appointees
Professors
Evelyn Lincoln, Brown University (emerita)
Kress-Beinecke Professor, 2025–2026
Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine
Andrew W. Mellon Professor, 2024–2026
Christian Scheidemann, Contemporary Conservation
Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, September 2025–March 2026
Senior Fellows
Sinclair Bell, Northern Illinois University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, spring 2026
Aethiopians in Roman Art and Society: Race, Representation, and Social Practice
Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow
Igbo Ukwu to Igbo Landing: How Medieval African Objects Speak
Dario Donetti, Università di Verona
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, fall 2025
Drawing by Emulation in Renaissance Rome: A Study of the Morgan Library's Codex Mellon
Sarah Gould, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
William C. Seitz Senior Fellow
Painting with Steam: Pollution and Visual Culture in 19th-Century Britain
Kristina Kleutghen, Washington University in St. Louis
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, spring 2026
Lens onto the World: Optical Devices, Art, Science, and Society in China
Megan E. O'Neil, Emory University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, fall 2025
Investigating the Market in Mesoamerican and Central American Antiquities, 1930s–1970s
David W. Penney, Washington, DC
Paul Mellon Senior Fellow
Indigenous Land/American Landscape: Indigenous Dispossession and American Landscape Painting of the Mid-19th Century
Ünver Rüstem, Johns Hopkins University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow
Turkish Habits: Ottoman Costume and the Art of Self-Representation
Ailsa Mellon Bruce National Gallery of Art Sabbatical Fellows
Mary Morton, Department of French Paintings
Mary Cassatt: To Venture Independence
Elisabeth Narkin, Department of Image Collections
Building Dynasty: Architecture and the French Royal Family Before Versailles
Maggie Wessling, Department of Photograph Conservation
Oral History and Genealogy of Master Photograph Printers
Postdoctoral Fellows
Ana Cristina Perry, Oberlin College and Conservatory
Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025–2027
Methods of Encounter: Raphael Montañez Ortiz and an Anti-Colonial Alternative Art
Hugo Shakeshaft, Washington, DC
A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024–2026
Lifelikeness: A Story of Art in Archaic and Classical Greece
Predoctoral Dissertation Fellows (in Residence)
Alice Casalini, University of Chicago
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2024–2026
Paradigms of Beholding: The Architecture of Religious Experience in Gandhāra
Rowanne Dean, University of Chicago
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2023–2026
Valuing Virtuosity: Goldsmiths' Work in Northwestern Europe, c. 1350–1500
Ryan Eisenman, University of Pennsylvania
David E. Finley Fellow, 2023–2026
The Limoges Champlevé Enamel Industry, c. 1180–1280
Virginia Girard, Columbia University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2024–2026
Geomyths in Early Netherlandish Landscapes, 1500–1600
Elizabeth Keto, Yale University
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2025–2027
Reconstruction's Objects: Art in the United States South, 1865–1900
Nathalie Miraval, Yale University
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2024–2026
Sacred Subversions: Martha, Monsters, and Domestic Devotion in the Afro-Iberian Atlantic
Isabella Shey Robbins, Yale University
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2024–2026
Relationality and Being: Indigeneity, Space, and Transit in Global Contemporary Art
Predoctoral Dissertation Fellows (Not in Residence)
Alec Aldrich, University of California, Santa Barbara
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow, 2025–2026
Common Ground: Land, Landscape, and Technology in the Dutch Republic
Trevor C. Brandt, University of Chicago
David E. Finley Fellow, 2025–2028
Prints and Piety at the Edges of the German-Speaking World, c. 1650–1800
Hsin-Yun Cheng, University of Rochester
Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2025–2026
Subjectivity in Displacement: Asian American Art and Its Discontents, 1968–2017
Harry C. H. Choi, Stanford University
Twelve-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2025–2026
Discordant Visions: The Emergence of Experimental Film in South Korea, 1964–1977
Sylvia Faichney, University of California, Santa Barbara
Wyeth Fellow, 2025–2027
The Domesticated Landscape of War: Army Family Housing, Settler Belonging, and Environmental Toxicity in the United States
Ekaterina Koposova, Yale University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2025–2027
The Flow of Art in the Franco-Dutch War
Khushmi Mehta, CUNY Graduate Center
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2025–2027
Entangled Narratives: Formations of Collectivity and Community at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (1960s–1980s)
Sharon Mizbani, Yale University
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2025–2027
Mediated Waters: Architecture of Thirst and Nourishment in Late Ottoman Istanbul
Sofia Pitouli, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2025–2028
The Pindos Mountains: Land, Art, and Community (13th–15th Centuries)
Emily Whitehead, Emory University
David E. Finley Fellow, 2024–2027
Variance and Innovation in Middle Kingdom Coffins at a Time of Standardization and Homogeneity
Margaret Wilson, The Ohio State University
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2024–2027
Making and Breaking Enclosure: The Movement of Art Through Late Medieval Convents
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