Meet the Fellows

Orfeo Cellura holds a dual PhD in Art History (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata,” USI); his dissertation examined landscape painting produced in Rome in the first half of the nineteenth century with a focus on Giovan Battista Bassi (1784-1852). He has received internships and fellowships in Italy (Bologna’s Fondazione Zeri; Venice’s Fondazione Cini) and visited Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst as a research assistant to study Danish artists. His research focuses on the process of painting and drawing outdoors from the early seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries in Rome, the identification of artists and places depicted, and the studies of nephology, geology, and botany in connection with landscape art.

Virginia Girard is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University focusing on the art and environment of early modern Europe. Her dissertation recovers localized myths and folklore associated with the climate and geology of late medieval Flanders to consider their influence on the development of the landscape genre. Prior to starting the PhD program, Virginia completed her MA with distinction at the Courtauld Institute of Art and her BA at Cornell University with honors. She has held positions at the gallery Les Enluminures, Pace Gallery, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Jessica Weiss is Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her research focuses on the Spanish reception of Netherlandish art during the fifteenth century and the ways in which artistic taste coincided with cultural and political trends. She is especially interested in the patronage of Queen Isabel of Castile and her court artist Juan de Flandes. Her publications include “Relics of Los Reyes Católicos: Spanish Habsburg Family Heirlooms and Dynastic Identity” in Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (Brepols, 2018) and “Art Commissioned and Collected by Queen Isabel” in the Companion to Isabel la Católica (Brill, 2022).

Caitlin Miller is a PhD candidate at Columbia University specializing in early modern painting and drawing (1300-1650) with a focus on central and northern Italy. Her dissertation project “Leonardeschi Reconsidered: Giovanni Boltraffio, Andrea Solario, and Bernardino Luini, 1490-1530” rethinks the intersections between politics and workshop spaces/practices in Renaissance Milan. Her work has been supported by the Casa Muraro Research Library and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Caitlin received her BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her MA and MPhil from the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia. Before joining the Met as the 2022-2023 Eugene V. Thaw Fellow, she held positions at the Detroit Institute of Arts as well as the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Anna studied art history and French at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where she completed her PhD in 2021. A specialist in eighteenth-century French art and art criticism, she will spend the fellowship developing a book manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation, ‘The mute who speaks: women’s voices on art in prerevolutionary France.’ Her research interests include marginal literatures, oral culture, and sociability, particularly as they relate to the overlapping histories of class, gender, and sexuality.

Marina Kliger holds an MA in Art History from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in September 2020. Her dissertation, "Une Histoire Particulière: The Troubadour Style and Gendered Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century France," examines the gender politics of history painting after the French Revolution vis-a-vis women collectors' historical self-fashioning across media. She has previously held positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. As the inaugural Thaw Fellow at The Met, she is researching the provenance, exhibition, and publication histories of the museum's nineteenth-century European paintings.

Natalie Prizel holds a Ph.D. in English from Yale University and has served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows and as visiting assistant professor at Bard College. Her first book, "Innocent Eyes: Victorian Ethical Optics and Aberrant Bodies," is under review, and she is at work on two projects, one called "Pre-Raphaelite in Black" and the other, "Dark Waters: Oceanic Aesthetics, Black Bodies, and the British Empire." Prizel’s work has been published in Victorian Poetry, GLQ, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, and Literature Compass, among other venues. She has participated in exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art and Princeton University Art Museum, as well as the Met's "Crip the Met" initiative.