Meet the Staff

Jane R. Becker studied art history at Williams College and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she received her PhD. She joined the department in early 2015 after lecturing for The Met; holding curatorial positions at the Dahesh Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, and Kimbell Art Museum; and working as an independent art historian. Jane conducts research on the department's nineteenth-century paintings, writes catalogue entries and information about the collection online, and works on exhibitions of nineteenth-century art. In addition to having contributed to the exhibition catalogue Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016), she lectures and publishes more broadly on nineteenth-century painting and sculpture.

Tiarra Brown received her Bachelor's degree in both history and art history at Rutgers University in 2017 before acquiring her Master’s Degree at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She began her career at The Met as a Spring Intern in 2021 and officially joined the department in June of 2022. She has held previous curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American art and focuses on the interplay of 18th and 19th Century European painting and Contemporary art.

Lisa Cain coordinates the arrangements for artworks coming in and out of the department working closely with her colleagues in European Paintings, Paintings Conservation, and the offices of the Registrar and Secretary and General Counsel. She began at The Met in 2000 as an assistant registrar for special exhibitions before joining European Paintings in 2005. Prior to The Met, she worked as a registrar at the Brooklyn Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York. Lisa studied French literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 in France.

Richard Carino received his BA from Rutgers University with his major in graphic design. He worked in pharmaceutical advertising as a junior graphic designer and eventually became an art director, but the corporate setting of advertising wasn’t where he wanted to be in his career. He started working at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early nineties in the Retail department and then made his way into the security department in 2016. Richard joined the Department of European Paintings as a gallery technician in 2022.

Gillian Carver joined the Museum in July of 2022; she works with the department to coordinate the Friends of European Painting membership program as well as acting as the executive assistant to the curator-in-charge. Gillian received her BA in history of art and architecture with minors in museum studies and Africana studies and a certificate in Nonprofit Management from the University of Pittsburgh. Previously she worked at CUE Art Foundation a non-profit gallery located in Chelsea, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Homeless Children Education Fund in Pittsburgh.

Laura D. Corey received her BA from Duke University and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she specialized in nineteenth-century French art and wrote her dissertation on Mary Cassatt’s role as an advisor to American collectors. She began her career at The Met as a summer intern in 2010 and has since worked on Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (2013), Seurat’s Circus Sideshow (2017), and Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence (2018). Now jointly appointed in the Director’s Office, she is organizing the Museum’s 150th anniversary exhibition Making The Met, 1870–2020 (2020) with Deputy Director for Collections and Administration Andrea Bayer, and works on projects that span the curatorial, conservation, and science areas of the Museum.

Nicole DeSantis joined the department in early 2020. She coordinates and documents art movement for the European Paintings Skylights Project and oversees the collection in storage. Prior to European Paintings, she was a Collections Management Intern for the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Museum, and worked at a New York-based gallery specializing in sixteenth to nineteenth century Americana. She received her BA in Art History at Hunter College and graduated with departmental honors.

Adam Eaker studied art history at Yale University and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in 2016. A specialist in Northern European and British painting of the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, he was previously a visiting scholar at the Rubenianum Research Institute for Flemish Art in Antwerp. Before joining the staff of The Met, he served as an Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow and subsequently guest curator at the Frick Collection, where he co-curated the exhibition Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture (2016) At The Met, He curated the exhibition In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met, as well as a future exhibition about art at the Tudor courts.

Alison Hokanson helps oversee The Met's holdings of nineteenth-century European paintings. She studied art history as an undergraduate at Brown University and then at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she received her PhD. She began working at The Met in graduate school and held positions as an exhibition assistant, Theodore Rousseau Fellow, and researcher before becoming a curator. Trained in nineteenth-century French and Belgian art, she has broadened her horizons with exhibitions on the Pre-Raphaelites and on J. M. W. Turner, and is now studying and developing the Museum's collection of Central and Northern European painting.

Harrison Jackson joined the department in 2019. She catalogues Italian, French, and British Old Master Paintings and manages our Instagram page, @meteuropeanpaintings. Prior to European Paintings, she spent four years as a research assistant and collections management assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum. She holds an MA in the history of art and architecture from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University.

Sarah Lees is a specialist in nineteenth-century art who studied at Harvard/Radcliffe College and the Institute of Fine Arts, where she received her PhD. She first worked as a research assistant in European Paintings during graduate school, and subsequently served as a curator at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and at Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is currently assisting with preparations for the upcoming exhibition Van Gogh Cypresses.

Francesca Marzullo joined the department in 2019 to work on exhibitions of Italian paintings. A specialist in medieval and Renaissance Italian art, she studied art history at Williams College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University, where she completed her PhD in 2020. She also received an MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge.

John McKanna has been hanging pictures in the European Paintings galleries since 1997. He holds a BA from Bennington College and a MMus from Yale University. In addition to his work at the Museum, John is also a painter and musician; his work can be viewed on his Instagram.

Jennifer Meagher joined the department in 1999. She catalogues Dutch, Flemish, German, Netherlandish, and Spanish Old Master Paintings. She has also written extensively for the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. 

Asher Miller, a specialist in nineteenth-century art, joined the department as a research assistant in 2001. He has contributed to innumerable in-gallery and editorial projects at The Met, such as Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde (2006), The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (2009), and Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016). He curated the exhibitions The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785–1850 (2013), Peder Balke: Painter of Northern Light (2017), and Delacroix (2018). Asher received his BA in history and art history from Bowdoin College and his PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

(also see the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art)

Denise, who joined The Met in January 2020, received her PhD in art history from Columbia University in 2014. She was previously the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (2014–2019), where she was the curator of the exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (October 2018–February 2019) and a co-curator of its expansion at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Le modèle noir de Gericault à Matisse (March–July 2019). Denise previously received an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked in finance and consulting. She has taught art history at Columbia University in New York and in Paris. 

Haley S. Pierce received her BA in art history from the College of Charleston, her MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is currently a PhD candidate at Emory University, specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art. Previously an intern in the European Paintings department at The Met where she assisted with Delacroix (2018), Haley has also held curatorial positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. While at Emory, Haley was also a Mellon Graduate Fellow in Object-Centered Curatorial Research at the High Museum of Art.

David Pullins studied art history at Columbia University, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 2016. After holding fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University Art Museums, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and served as an assistant curator at The Frick Collection. At The Met, he helps to develop, research, and present seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French, Italian and Spanish painting.

Tiffany Racco studied art history at the University of Delaware, where she received her PhD in 2017. A specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, she was previously a research associate at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and has held fellowships at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, and The Met. She joined the department in 2021 to work on the reinstallation of the European Paintings galleries.

Susan Alyson Stein joined the department in 1981 after a yearlong Mellon Fellowship at the Guggenheim. At The Met, she has curated/co-curated twenty exhibitions, from Cézanne Watercolors (1988) to Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (2013), Seurat's Circus Sideshow (2017), and Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence (2018), while contributing to more than fifty Museum publications devoted to artists ranging from Goya to Picasso. Her long-standing work on Van Gogh extends from Van Gogh: A Retrospective (1986), which remains a standard reference source, to recent exhibition projects that include Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings (2005), which received awards from the AICA and AAMC, and Van Gogh: Irises and Roses (2015). 

Gretchen joined the Museum in late 2021. She handles the day-to-day upkeep of the European Paintings office and manages the labels for the department. Previously, she worked as an admin and office manager at a kitchen design firm in Brooklyn and at the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute in communications design, majoring in illustration.

Jill Wickenheisser joined the Museum in 2011, and began her role in European Paintings in 2019. Jill manages the department's day-to-day activities and works closely with curators, collection managers, conservators, technicians, and administrative staff within the department and across the Museum on matters relating to the care and display of the European Paintings collection. Jill also manages the department’s operating budget, donor funds, and human resources. Jill holds an MBA from the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, a Masters in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute, and a BA in art history from Rutgers University.

Stephan Wolohojian received his PhD from Harvard University and has been a curator in the department since 2015. He has held academic and museum positions, most recently at the Harvard Art Museums, where he played an active role in the institution's curatorial reorganization and the reinstallation of its permanent collections in the Renzo Piano-designed building. At The Met, he has curated the focus exhibition Velázquez Portraits: Truth in Painting (2016) and wrote the introductory essay in the Bulletin dedicated to Charles LeBrun's celebrated Everhard Jabach (1618–1695) and His Family. In addition to his responsibilities for Baroque painting, Stephan has a longstanding interest in fourteenth-century Sienese art.

Maryan Ainsworth studied at Oberlin College (BA and MA) and Yale (Ph.D.). Both Oberlin and Yale have extraordinary art museums, where Maryan first learned the importance of first-hand study of art objects. She joined The Met's staff in 1977 and has specialized in an interdisciplinary approach, combining art-historical issues with the technical examination of Northern Renaissance paintings. Her publications and exhibitions include monographic studies on Petrus Christus, Gerard David, Jan Gossart, and Pieter Coecke van Aelst, as well as The Met's early German paintings. Maryan has taught at Barnard College; as the Janson-La Palme Visiting Professor, Princeton (2017); and the Kress-Beinecke Professor, CASVA, National Gallery of Art (2018-19).

Katharine Baetjer's primary areas of interest are eighteenth-century English, French, and Venetian Old Master paintings and pastels and, secondarily, European portrait miniatures. She has also written on Klimt and Jackson Pollock at The Met and on the history and formation of the collection. A contributor to the online catalogue, she was also a longtime member of the editorial board of the Metropolitan Museum Journal.

Keith Christiansen began his career as assistant curator in 1977 and between 2009 and 2021 was the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings. In his forty-four years at the Museum, he collaborated in the organization of over twenty exhibitions on Italian, Spanish and French artists. He has taught at Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and was the Clarence and Ruth Wedgewood Kennedy Professor in Renaissance Studies at Smith College (1999) and guest professor at Vassar (2006). In addition to the many acquisitions he pursued that have enriched the Museum’s collection, he has published widely and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, conferred by the Ministry of Arts in France.