Ellie Canning is a doctoral student studying colonial New Spain and 19th century Mexico with Dr. Derek Burdette. She received her B.A. in Art History and Latin and Iberian Studies from the University of Delaware in 2020, and her M.A. in Art History from George Mason University in 2022. She previously worked at the Dallas Museum of Art on the exhibitions "Abraham Angel: Between Wonder and Seduction" and curated textile rotations for the Indigenous American Arts gallery in the museum. Ellie is drawn to geopolitical and ecological impacts on material production and art in colonial and independent Mexico.

Helena Chen-Abair is a doctoral candidate in art history specializing in Chinese antiquarianism. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “From Paper to Bronze and Back Again: The Forging of Ancient Chinese Bronzes, 1840s-1940s,” explores the interdependent relationship between bronze forgery and the scholarship of Chinese antiquarianism. This project has been supported by the Mellon, the Esherick-Ye, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the Association for Art History (AAH), among others. Her research interests also include the production and reception of printed catalogues of antiquities and ink rubbings, the history and culture of art collecting, and technical art history. Helena earned her BA in history at the Soochow University, Taiwan, and her MA in art history at the University of Florida. She is a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Asian Art (2024-25) and a Junior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.

chen.ch@ufl.edu

Laura R. Colkitt is a doctoral candidate studying modern and contemporary art. Laura received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with an MA in art history from University of South Florida. She is the recipient of several fellowships and academic awards including the Rothman Doctoral Fellowship, Grinter Fellowship, and Jerry Cutler Graduate Student Travel Award. In her research, she explores hybridity of cultures in the global age with a specific focus on the transatlantic connection between Europe, North America, and South America. Her MA culminated with an examination of discrete globalization in “From Local to Global: Kama Wangdi Paints Bhutan's Changing Geopolitics” (2015). Her forthcoming dissertation, “In Between Relations: Liliana Porter’s Art,” aims to track a constellation of concerns that inform the contemporary art practice of Liliana Porter. She presented the second chapter, “Dissections of Decorated Depictions," at the 2020 College Art Association (CAA) conference. Recent publications include a book chapter titled “Randomness, Order, and Being” in Sandra Cinto: Acaso e Necessidade (2017) and numerous contributions to exhibition catalogues for the USF Contemporary Art Museum. Before coming to University of Florida, Laura helped curate private art collections. Her advisor is Dr. Kaira M. Cabañas.

Vanessa Gillette Wyland is a doctoral student studying the arts of colonial New Spain with Dr. Derek Burdette. Vanessa earned her MA in Art History (2022) and her BA in English - Writing Studies (2020) from the University of South Florida. Her research explores the intersection of art, faith, and identity in colonial Mexico through the lens of gender studies and material religion. She aims to uncover how sacred objects and spaces mediated relationships with the divine and shaped personal and communal identities. She is also drawn to the cross-cultural translations of material culture of the early modern period and to the tensions, entanglements, and identities born from colonialism. Vanessa has presented her research at FSU's Art History Symposium (2024), SECOLAS (2024), Cornell University’s Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (2022), and the UVA [After]Lives of Objects Symposium (2021), among others. Her work has been published in the Rutgers Art Review and is forthcoming publication in The Latinamericanist.

Cordelia Kapfer is a Fulbright student from Switzerland, pursuing a MA in modern and contemporary art with Dr. Rachel Silveri. Cordelia completed her BA with a Major in Art History and a Minor Sociology in 2024 at the University of Zurich. In her Bachelor thesis entitled "On the Road: A Journey Through Documentary Photography and the Cultural Landscape of the United States in the 20th Century" Cordelia examined the influence of 20th-century American documentary photography on cultural perception and collective memory, focusing on how photographers captured the spirit of their time through their travels across the United States. Her current research focuses on the diverse artistic movements that emerged in the United States during the twentieth century.

Callum Karoleski is a second-year M.A. student studying gender and divine embodiment in Pre-Conquest Mesoamerican art under Dr. Derek Burdette. They earned their BA in Art History with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Florida, resulting in an undergraduate thesis that explored a postmodern transgender examination of hagiographic visual imagery, titled “(Trans)Formation: Imagining Saint Eugenia’s Gender Crossing in Medieval Art” (2023) Their research interests include deity embodiment in Nahua religion and visualizations of gender and gender performance within Mexica visual practice. Their thesis project involves destabilizing perceived gendered boundaries between deities in Mexica imperial art through the formulation of a trans* methodology rooted in cultural practice. In doing so this project presents new modes of thinking about Mexica art through dynamics of surface, visibility, fluidity, and symmetry.

Vivian Lantow is a PhD student studying pre-Columbian art under the guidance of Dr. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi. Her topics of interest include Andean archaeology, commodity exchanges, ritual offerings found with capac hucha burials, falsifications of Pre‐Columbian artifacts, and depictions of race and social stratification by both Spanish and Indigenous artists in early colonial Peru. Vivian received her MA and BA in art history at the University of Florida. Her MA research culminated with her thesis title “Mitigating Museum Mistakes: A Case Study of a Gold Vessel from the Chimú.” In this thesis, Vivian used an unprovenienced gold cup as a case study to explore widespread issues related to the exhibition of pre-Columbian gold in museums. Before coming to the University of Florida, Vivian completed her associate of science degree in Zoo Animal Technology at Santa Fe College. She later returned to school to earn her associate of arts in Fine Arts at Santa Fe College, with a focus on drawing. While at Santa Fe Vivian worked as a gallery assistant and was an assistant curator for the Santa Fe Celebrates Collectors exhibition at the Santa Fe Gallery. 

Jennifer McAninch received her BA in Art History from Arizona State University and her MA in Art Education from University of Florida, graduating both programs Summa Cum Laude. While studying abroad in Italy, she completed a museum internship at the Basilica of Santa Croce. She also participated in a study of Florentine architecture extending over a period from the Late Medieval through the Baroque. The following year, Jennifer was a member of the archeological crew for the excavation at Piazza Garibaldi in Fiesole, Italy. She is currently in her second year, pursuing a PhD in Art History with a focus on residential art and architecture from the intermediate years of the Roman Empire. Her current research project involves analyzing the design program of a second century maritime villa on the Gulf of Baratti in Populonia, Italy. Jennifer was recently admitted to the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence as a visiting scholar and presenter for the upcoming program "The City as Archive." She also served as a 2018 delegate to the national convention of the Archaeological Institute of America. Some of her peripheral areas of interest are Gender Studies in Art, Late Italian Renaissance, Ancient Mesoamerica, as well as Mid Century Modern Art and Architecture.

Valerie C. Palazzolo is a doctoral student studying the gendering of space in the later Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance with Dr. Elizabeth Ross. Her secondary interest focuses on the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora. She received her MA in Art History from the University of South Florida (2011) where her research focused on Andreas Vesalius’ animated skeletons as sites for self-knowledge and self-fashioning. This research has been presented at graduate and professional symposia and conferences including: The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (2015), Indiana University, Bloomington (2011), Nicolaus Copernicus University in Turuñ, Poland (2010), and the University of Texas at Austin (2008). She has held the position of Assistant Professor of Art History and Humanities at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida - where she lives full time – since 2014 (tenured 2019). This position has allowed her to expand into art historical pedagogy and she has presented on diversity and global perspectives in the Western canon at both the annual meeting of the College Art Association (2017) and the Community College Humanities Association Southern Division Conference (2014). She has additionally taught for USF’s Study Abroad program in Paris, France and currently serves on the Program Committee of the Italian Art Society. 

Rónan is an MA candidate studying global modern and contemporary art with Dr. Silveri. He received bachelor's degrees in studio art and art history from Penn State in May 2024. He has won multiple awards for his research on various artists such as Diego Rivera, Wifredo Lam, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Oscar Niemeyer. He's presented at several conferences including SECAC (2022, 2023, and 2024), the SUNY New Paltz Symposium for Undergraduates (2023 and 2024), and Jazz Age Illustration (2024), organized at the Delaware Museum of Art in conjunction with their special exhibition of the same name. He has also completed internships with the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State and will participate in a curatorial internship at the Harn Museum of Art in Spring 2025. In his forthcoming thesis, Rónan aims to explore the relationship between visual art, war, and the body in the early twentieth century. After graduating in May 2026, he plans to work towards a PhD.

Sasha Snyder is an MA student with a specialization in pre-contact Mexica art working with Dr. Derek Burdette. Sasha graduated with her BA in Art History, also from the University of Florida, in 2023. Her current research focuses on the intersection of linguistics and art history, and she is interested in exploring abstraction through Mexica artistic practice.

sashasnyder@ufl.edu

Savannah Tew is a second-year M. A. student studying Art History with Dr. Silveri at the University of Florida. She received her B. A. in Art History and Arts Management from the College of Charleston in 2023. Her research concerns United States art of the twentieth century with a focus on women and other under-represented artists. She is also interested in artistic production in the U.S. South. Currently, she is working on her master’s thesis, researching art from the U.S. HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Allison Westerfield is a doctoral student studying modern art at the University of Florida. She received her BA in Arts Administration from the University of West Florida and an MA in Art History from Savannah College of Art and Design. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Queen of Pentacles: Women Surrealists & The Tarot of Pamela Coleman Smith,” argues that a renewed interest in the occult, specifically the symbolism of tarot cards, influenced avant-garde visual artists of the twentieth century, in particular, women Surrealists. She is a recipient of the Rothman Doctoral Fellowship as well as the Charles T. Woods Student Grant which supports research that addresses issues within LGBTQ+ communities. In 2024, she attended the Middlebury Language Immersion for Spanish program with the help of the Kress Fellowship in European Art History. She also works as an independent curator, curating exhibitions such as mini golf of sensual sports photographs by McKinna Anderson, Waiting Room at Laundromat Art Space in Miami, and Ctrl [Alt] Self at Westobou Gallery in Augusta, Ga. Most recently, she curated Double Space: Women Photographers and Surrealism at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Laura Wimmer is a second-year Art History MA student who is also working on a certificate in Curatorial Studies. Her thesis will discuss visual and ideological adaptions of Chinese architectural elements and design into 18th-century French gardens. She received her BA in Art History from the University of Texas at Arlington, double minoring in French and Museum Studies. Laura has worked in several museums throughout her life and hopes to secure a curatorial position upon graduation.