Tony Abeyta, contemporary Diné (Navajo) artist. A graduate of New York University with an honorary doctorate from the Institute of American Indian Arts, he is recognized as a “Native Treasure” by the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. Recipient, New Mexico Governor’s Excellence in the Arts Award (2012.) Public and private collections holding his work include the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denver Art Museum, and the Autry Museum of the American West.
Amanda C. Burdan, Senior Curator, Brandywine Museum of Art. Burdan is collaborating with Erin Pauwels and Jonathan Frederick Walz on a forthcoming exhibition on Pennsylvania modernist Charles Demuth (opening: Brandywine, 2027) that relates to her previous exhibition, “Rural Modern: American Art Beyond the City,” and the catalogue of the same name focused on the transfer of modernism from urban to rural locales.
Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History Emerita, Stanford University. She retired from 40 years of teaching in 2008 and moved to Cape Cod, MA where she continues to research, write, and organize exhibitions including “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” (2017) at the Brooklyn Museum and six additional venues. Her current project is a book and exhibition, Couple with the Pitchfork: From Local Folk to Global Icon, that look at Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) and how it’s been appropriated and reworked in low, middle, and high culture. Board member, Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the National Advisory Council, Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, and Chair, Advisory Board for Historic Artists Homes and Studios (HAHS).
Robert Cozzolino, independent curator, art historian, and critic based in Minneapolis. He curates collaboratively, in partnership with artists, colleagues, and broad communities. He is drawn to artists who aspire to visually express intangible states of consciousness and the full range of emotions. Along with topics from the 19th and 20th centuries, he regularly engages with contemporary artists to examine history. His numerous publications include Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021) and World War I and American Art (2016).
Kristin deGhetaldi, Delaware-based conservator of paintings. She began her private practice in 2009 and has since worked for private clients and collectors, galleries, government, auction houses, artists, and foundations. She received a BA (2003) from Grinnell College, and an MS (2008) and a PhD in Preservation Studies (2017), both from the University of Delaware. She completed an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Painting Conservation at the National Gallery of Art, earned a postbaccalaureate certificate in conservation (2004) at the Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy.
Erika Doss, Distinguished Chair in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, University of Texas at Dallas. Her multiple books include Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy (1995), Looking at Life Magazine (ed., 2001), Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010), American Art of the 20th – 21st Centuries (2017), and Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (2023). Board member, The Living New Deal.
Kathleen A. Foster, The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator and Head of American Art and Director of the Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and Adjunct Professor, History of Art, University of Pennsylvania. She has published on topics in American art from the late-18th century to the present, with an emphasis on Thomas Eakins. Publication and exhibition topics include Thomas Hart Benton’s Indiana murals, Thomas Chambers, and Winslow Homer’s The Life Line. A contributor to the catalogue Mary Cassatt at Work (2024), her most recent PMA project was the exhibition and book, American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent (2017).
Jennifer Gibson, former Director, U.S. General Services Administration (GSA)’s Center for Fine Arts. At the GSA, she was responsible for the Fine Arts Collection and the Art in Architecture program. After joining the GSA as a project manager for Art in Architecture, she assumed responsibility for the Fine Arts Program, subsequently establishing and becoming director of the Center for Fine Arts. Member, Federal Reserve Board Collections Panel.
Randall Griffey, Director, American Art Program, The Henry Luce Foundation. He began his curatorial career at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and later became Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College. Previously curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013 – 2022) and Head Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum (2022 – 2025). A native of Edmond, Kansas, Griffey earned a BA in Fine Arts from Bethany College and an MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Kansas.
Anne Helmreich, Director, Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution. The AAA constitute the world’s preeminent research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making accessible primary sources documenting the history of the visual arts in America. Previously, associate director of grants programming, Getty Foundation and associate director of digital initiatives, Getty Research Institute, she served as Dean, College of Fine Arts and Professor of Art History, Texas Christian University, and Director, Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and Associate Professor of Art History, Case Western Reserve University.
Garth Johnson, Paul Phillips & Sharon Sullivan Curator of Ceramics, Everson Museum of Art. He was previously Curator of Ceramics, Arizona State University Ceramics Research Center. His recent exhibitions at the Everson include “The Floating Bridge: Postmodern and Contemporary Japanese Ceramics,” “Renegades & Reformers: American Art Pottery,” and “Earth Piece: Conceptual and Performative Works in Clay.”
Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History, James Madison University; she was the curator of and author of Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity. She has been a guest curator at the Harvard Art Museums, the Phillips Collection, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, and is an internationally recognized scholar of documentary photography in the United States and in Puerto Rico.
Lisa Koenigsberg, President and Founder, Initiatives in Art and Culture (IAC). Over 25 years ago, she established IAC’s multidisciplinary conference series on visual culture, including those on American Art and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Her writings have appeared in the books The Art of Collecting, Auspicious Vision: Edward Wales Root and American Modernism, and The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame, and the journals American Art Journal and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. She holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and Yale University from which she received her PhD.
Larry List, New York-based writer and independent curator. List has organized exhibitions and written about Dada, Surrealism, modern and contemporary art for The Noguchi Museum, The Menil Collection, The Tate Modern, The Andy Warhol Museum, Reykjavik Art Museum, DOX Center for Art, Prague, and others.
His exhibitions include “The Imagery of Chess Revisited”; “The Art of Chess; Man Ray & Sherrie Levine”; “John Cage and Glenn Kaino: Pieces and Performances,” and “SKINTRADE.” List’s most recent publication, Permanent Attraction: Man Ray & Chess, is the first comprehensive book the artist’s chess-related work.
John P. Murphy, Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. He is the author of New Deal Art: Culture and Crisis in the Great Depression (2025). Co-curator of the exhibition “The Left Front: Radical Art in the ‘Red Decade’, 1929 – 1940” at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Northwestern University, he is also a leading scholar on African American artist Charles White.
Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director, Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). Previously, BMA’s Interim co-director and Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator (2018 – 2022.) Prior to the BMA, Naeem was a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Her dissertation appeared as the book, Out of Earshot: Sound, Technology, and Power in American Art, 1847–1897 (2020). She holds a BA from The Johns Hopkins University, a JD from Temple University, and a PhD in art history from the University of Maryland.
Mark Nelson, New York-based author and book designer. For the past 30 years he has collaborated with leading museums (including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago), artists (including Vija Celmins, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer, Gilbert and George, Günther Uecker, Pat Steir, Francesco Clemente, David Hammons and Richard Serra), and galleries on their publications. He is the author of Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Presenters Dahlia Murder (with S. H. Bayliss) and of Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Midcentury L.A. (with W. H. Sherman and E. Hoobler).
David Olin, CEO and Chief of Conservation for Easel and Wall Paintings, Olin Conservation, Inc. and Fellow, American Institute for Conservation. Olin has provided conservation services for the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum, the State of Maryland and New York City. Olin Conservation is the sole painting and mural conservator for federal agencies including the Architect of the Capitol, the US Army Center of Military History, the US Senate, the National Museum of the Marine Corps, and the GSA for the wall paintings and frescoes in the National Capitol Region.
Sarah Ayala Parchman, artist living in Fort Worth, Texas. Her work examines landscape, memory, and identity through cartography and public art.
Laura Polucha, Director, The Illustrated Gallery in Pennsylvania. New York City-based, she has served as illustration art specialist and cataloguer for Swann Auction Galleries, a research associate for Hawthorne Fine Art, and a specialist for Artsy and 1stDibs. While earning her graduate degree in Art History from Columbia University, she held curatorial internships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Jami C. Powell, Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art, Hood Museum of Art and Senior Lecturer, Native American and Indigenous Studies Department, Dartmouth College. A board member of the Native American Art Studies Association, Powell is a citizen of the Osage Nation and has a PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Powell co-edited Re-Envisioning American Art: Transforming Museum Practice (2025) and curated “Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” and contributed to the accompanying catalogue.
Michelle Arcari Rose, Executive Director, Washington Heritage Museums; board member, Living New Deal; Adjunct Professor, University of Mary Washington.
Joyce Scott, sculptor and jewelry artist. Scott wields her sharp wit and humor to masterfully create bold, sculptural objects, bringing to light and driving home difficult topics such as racism, sexism, patriarchal structures, and the African diaspora. Scott received four honorary doctorates and a 2016 McArthur Fellowship. Scott’s passion for the arts and commitment to social reform through her work has made her an icon of the contemporary art world. In 2024, Scott’s work was featured in a major retrospective organized by and on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art (March – July 2024) and at the Seattle Art Museum (October 2024 – January 2025).
Dan Shogren, collector, with his wife Susan Meyer, of WPA painting and photography. Their collection is now the focus of the exhibition “Built to Last: The Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. His long career in manufacturing related environments led him to focus his collection on “Work and Industry in the 1930s.”
Lowery Stokes Sims, specialist in modern and contemporary art, craft, and design. Sims is known for her commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive global art world. After serving at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1972 – 1999); as Executive Director, President, and Adjunct Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem (2000 – 2007), she retired as Curator Emerita, Museum of Arts and Design (2015). She has since served as a guest curator for exhibitions at institutions throughout the US and as a consultant for the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Suzanne Smeaton, pioneer in the study and scholarship of America period frames. She has curated frame exhibitions at museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Columbus Museum of Art, and contributed to publications including The Gilded Edge, Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure,1895 – 1925, and Auspicious Vision: Edwin Wales Root and American Modernism. For some 27 years she was employed at the noted frame gallery of Eli Wilner & Company. Board member, Appraiser’s Association of America.
Janneken Smucker, Professor of History, West Chester University. Among her publications are Pattern and Paradox: The Quilts of Amish Women (2024), A New Deal for Quilts (2023; winner, Living New Deal Book Award), and Amish Quilts: Crafting and American Icon (2013). She hosts “Running Stitch,” A QSOS Podcast featuring oral histories with quiltmakers.
Don Stinson, Austin-based artist known for panoramic oil paintings that explore the geographies of the West. His work is in the collections of the Phoenix Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, The Whitney Collection at the Buffalo Center of the West, The Autry Museum of the American West, and the Art in Embassies program in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Andrew J. Walker, former Executive Director, Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Prior to joining the Carter in 2011 where he served for 14 years, Walker served as Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, and held curatorial positions at the Missouri History Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. The founder of Walker Art Consulting, Walker represents the American master sculptor, James Surls.
