Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art Fellows

Özge Karagöz is a Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern University. Her dissertation, “Refiguring Art Across Revolutions: Turkish and Soviet Artists in Alliance, 1933–1938.” recovers histories of artists and exhibitions traveling between Turkey and the Soviet Union repressed during the Cold War era, and aims to decenter the established narratives of modernism. The project also lays the groundwork for examining post-WWII artistic networks between the Soviet Union and the newly decolonized Middle Eastern nations formerly under Ottoman rule. At the Research Center, Özge worked on dioms of French modernism within Turkish-Soviet artistic debates, demonstrating their perceived aesthetic and political limits, as well as illuminating the new meanings Turkish modern art gained while circulating globally.

Kamila Kociałkowska is lecturer in History of Art at the University of Warwick, UK. She specializes in modernism in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, with a focus on how censorship and surveillance systems shape art production. She has held fellowships Humboldt University in Berlin and Harvard University. Her first book project, The Black Square and the Blue Pencil, rethinks the origins of abstraction through the lens of censorship studies. During her time at the Research Centre, she worked on her second book, Spying is Seeing: The Cryptographic Imagination in Postwar Painting 1943-1969, which will explore material histories of military encryption systems to study how the methods of codebreaking bureaus filtered down to inform the tools and techniques of artists’ ateliers.

Sabrina Carletti teaches at Lafayette College. Her Princeton Ph.D. focused on one of the central figures of the Argentinian avant-garde, the multimedia artist Xul Solar (1887-1963). It examined how the artist’s reevaluation of traditional genres and forms, novel combination of media, allusions to various technologies, and response to European modernisms offer new perspectives on the modernization of Argentinian society, ranging from issues of immigration and cosmopolitanism to the technological and pedagogical innovations that gave rise to a new reading public. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, she expanded her dissertation into a book manuscript. Prior to her academic work in the United States, Sabrina served as an instructor and director of theater and puppetry in Argentina.

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (2016), is an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry. She directed Coffee Futures (2009), an award-winning ethnographic film exploring contemporary Turkish politics through the prism of coffee fortune telling. Recent research examines photography as a tool of governmentality in the late Ottoman period. Current projects investigate the role of photography in the emergence of global surveillance regimes policing mobility and nationality. She recently co-edited a special issue of History of Photography on “Photography and Policing” with Jason Hill. At the Met she continued her research on photography and citizenship.

Adrienn Kácsor is currently a Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellow in Germany. She studies twentieth-century Soviet and international revolutionary arts and politics, with a focus on the hybrid aesthetics of Hungarian communist artists and theorists who lived in exile in Europe and the Soviet Union between the two world wars. By foregrounding the figure of the migrant in histories of European and Soviet modern art, she seeks to rethink the relationship between avant-garde and socialist realist aesthetics. At the Research Center, Adri completed her Northwestern University dissertation “Migrant Aesthetics: Hungarian Artists in the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919-1945.” She has published essays in Art History and the Getty Research Journal as well as in edited volumes.

Stephanie Huber’s dissertation, “Cultural Predicaments: Neorealism in The Netherlands, 1927–1945” addressed an unsettling figurative painting style that conveyed modern alienation by perversely appropriating Dutch Old Master traditions and combining them with film aesthetics. During her fellowship she transformed her thesis into a book, Dutch Neorealism, Cinema and the Politics of Painting, 1927-1945 (2025), which was supported by a Research Center Publication Grant. She has been awarded grants by the Mellon Council for European Studies, Fulbright, and the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. Peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Moving Image Review, Art Journal, and Modernism/Modernity. She currently teaches at Hunter College.

Jason Mientkiewicz is a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation examines the emergence of geometrical abstraction in Russia through the work of the collective "Affirmers of the New Art" (UNOVIS). It offers a critical history of the group, its expansion through rapidly restructuring art academies across the new Soviet state, and its participation in discourses concerning the role of art in the formation of revolutionary collective subjects. Those affiliated with UNOVIS engaged rigorously with developments in avant-garde art in Western Europe— especially Cubism. At the Research Center, Jason focused on Cubism's position in art school curricula throughout Russia at this moment, as well as its contested status in debates on art's role in socialist politics.

Hyewon Yoon teaches at Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. Her Harvard dissertation was “Exile at Work: The Photographic Portraiture of Gisèle Freund, Lisette Model, and Lotte Jacobi, 1930–1955”. At the Research Center, Yoon worked on a book on the work of Alexey Brodovitch, an émigré from Russia best known for his role as the Art Director of Harper’s Bazaar, considering how his graphisme derived from an aesthetic pastiche of a variety of European avant-garde movements. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte; essays include “Zum Thema des Porträts im Exil: Gisèle Freund in Frankfurt,” Fotogeschichte (2019) and “Practice in Color: Gisèle Freund in Paris,” October (2020).

Alexandra Chiriac specializes in histories of twentieth century modernism, with a focus on performance and design. She holds a PhD from the University of St. Andrews, and her research has been supported by numerous grants, including an award from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (2015–19). During her time as a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Chiriac completed her first monograph, Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022). Her publications examine aspects of Romanian, Jewish, and Soviet transnational design and performance history, and she has been an invited speaker at Columbia University and the Venice Biennale. Chiriac has worked at Sotheby’s and co-curated exhibitions at GRAD, a non-profit platform for Russian and Eastern European arts.

While at the Research Center, Meghan Forbes revised her Ph.D. (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) as Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print. Supported by a Leonard A. Lauder Publication Grant, the book examines Central European Modernism in the interwar period, exploring the ways in which the Devětsil group, based in Prague and Brno, utilized the production of printed matter to forge international networks of exchange in the 1920s. Forbes has received numerous other fellowships including a Fulbright Award (2014–15) and a Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives Fellowship at MoMA. She is editor of International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019) and co-curator of BAUHAUS↔VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels (MoMA, 2018).

Jonathan Vernon’s 2019 Ph.D. (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London) studied how Constantin Brancusi’s work was written into American, Western European, and Romanian art histories and reinterpreted by sculptors in the 1960s. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, he began a book project asking what the idea of the fragment has meant to modern history, culture and politics. Before joining the Research Center, Jonathan was an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld and Ridinghouse Contributing Editor at The Burlington Magazine. He has held fellowships at the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Moore Institute. His publications include a monograph on Modigliani and an exhibition catalogue on British sculpture since the 1960s for Karsten Schubert Gallery.

Hilary Whitham Sánchez is specializes in modern and contemporary art along the Black Atlantic. At the Research Center she completed her dissertation, the first comprehensive analysis of the dada poet Tristan Tzara’s activities as a critic, collector, and curator of African objects from the movement’s founding in 1917 to the opening of the exhibition African Negro Art at MoMA in 1935. Her analysis of the previously overlooked role of blackface in the dadaists’ 1921 performance has been published in Modernism/modernity. She is currently expanding her dissertation into a book that brings her study of Tzara’s activities into the period of African independence until his death in 1963. Her work has been supported by the CASVA at the National Gallery of Art, and the Mellon Foundation.

Giovanni Casini is a Researcher (Assistant Professor) at the University of Turin. During his time at the Research Center, he revised his doctoral dissertation on the Paris-based dealer Léonce Rosenberg, and published, with the support of a Publication Grant from The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, the monograph Léonce Rosenberg’s Cubism: The Galerie L’Effort Moderne in Interwar Paris (2023). Casini was a Fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art, NYC, and the Guggenheim’s 2017–18 Hilla Rebay International Curatorial Fellow. He is one of the researchers on the Research Program on Picasso initiated by FABA and led by Michael FitzGerald. In 2024, Casini curated Dans l’appartement de Léonce Rosenberg. De Chirico, Ernst, Léger, Picabia, at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.

Raphael Koenig is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, and affiliated faculty of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. His research focuses on the intersection of aesthetic and social issues in literature, philosophy, and the visual arts, including Disability Studies, Medical Humanities, Jewish Studies, Diasporic Literatures, and Critical Refugee Studies. Recent publications exploring the interplay between mental health and artistic production, include Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (Yale University Press – Clark Art Institute, 2023), and the edited volume L’art brut, objet inclassable? (Bordeaux University Press, 2021). He on the Editorial Board of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

Sean O’Hanlan is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at Stanford University. Her dissertation, provisionally titled “André Breton and the Modern Art of Collecting,” traces the evolution of poet and critic André Breton’s personal collection across much of the twentieth century, from its origins during the interwar period—owing much to the experimental forms of Cubism—to his articulation of the Surrealist movement in the postwar period. While in residence at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, she continued her doctoral research on the legacy of Breton’s interrelated and vitally important activities as a collector, gallerist, curator, and maker of objects, as they shaped the history of Surrealism and, indeed, modern art.

Luise Mahler is a Berlin-born independent art historian and researcher based in New York. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of art criticism, the history of art history, and language as well as on the art market. She is currently at work on a book comparing the cubist theories of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Vincenc Kramář with those of their Central and Eastern European contemporaries which she began during her residency at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. This study includes the first English-language translation of Kramář's 1921 book Kubismus by Alex Zucker and Nicholas Sawicki in collaboration with Charles W. Haxthausen and Mahler for which she received funding from FABA-Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. Her recent publications include “Reading Picasso in Munich and Prague in 1922"; an essay co-written with Anna Jozefacka and supported by a Josef Dobrovsky Fellowship of the Czech Academy of Sciences, as well as an introduction to Hedwig Fechheimer’s 1914 monograph Die Plastik der Ägypter (Reimer 2021), included in the first of two volumes produced by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) research network “Wege – Methoden – Kritiken: Kunsthistorikerinnen 1880-1970,” of which Mahler is a member. Between 2014 and 2016 she served as an Assistant Curator for the exhibition "Picasso Sculpture" at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2015 she co-chaired the symposium “Charting Cubism across Central and Eastern Europe.” Mahler holds an M.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York.

Maria Castro is Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. At the Research Center, she advanced her dissertation titled “Between São Paulo and Paris: Tarsila do Amaral and the Intersecting Identities of Antropofagia” (University of Pittsburgh, 2020). At SFMOMA, she contributed to Diego Rivera’s America (2022) and co-organizes the museum’s changing permanent collection Open Ended: SFMOMA’s Collection, 1900 to Now. Maria has curated or co-curated exhibitions including Pan American Unity: A Mural by Diego Rivera (2021), Amalia Mesa-Bains: Venus Envy, Chapter I and Madrinas y Hermanas (Godmothers and Sisters) (2022), A Living For Us All: Artists and the WPA (2022), and Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales (2023).

Rachel Boate received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2019. Her dissertation "Embodied Abstraction: The Crisis of Representation in 1930s France" examines the degree to which artists Jean Hélion, Fernand Léger, Vassily Kandinsky, and Joan Miró (among others) conflated abstract and representational forms in their work to create a new visual language in response to the ongoing social and political crises rocking interwar France. Boate teaches courses on modern art at New York University and Marymount Manhattan College. Her essay "Fernand Léger's New Realism: Painting for the People in 1930s France" will appear in the edited volume Realism(s) of the Avant-Garde in 2020.

Anna Jozefacka is an art historian specializing in modern architecture, art, and design history. Her research spans several broad areas: urban history, visual culture, interiors studies, and provenance. Some of these she pursues in the context of Cubism. She curated the exhibition Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023-24) about the unrealized painting commission Pablo Picasso received from the American artist, collector, and critic Hamilton Easter Field in 1909. She is the author of the lead essay in the accompanying catalogue as well as “A Home for Modern Art in Brooklyn,” in Perspectives. In addition, she is the author of the essay “Private Rooms of the Cubist Still Life” in Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature, and Design (1850–1920) (Bloomsbury 2022) andco-author of “Reading Picasso in Munich and Prague in 1922” in Umění/Art (2022); “Cubism Goes East: A Case Study of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Central Eastern European Network of Agents and Collectors,” in Years of Disarray 1908-1928: Between Anxiety and Delight: The Birth of the Modern Central-European Citizen (Olomouc Museum of Art, 2018); and “Catalogue of the Collection” in Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (New York, 2014). In 2015 she co-chaired the symposium Charting Cubism across Central and Eastern Europe.

Outside of Cubism, she co-authored The Propaganda Front: Postcards from the Era of World Wars (Boston 2017) and authored “The Matchbook and Its Transition from Commercial to Private Reminder” in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (2015) and “Bringing the Public Home: venues of cultural activity in wartime Warsaw (Faire venir le public à maison: les lieux culturels dans Varsovie occupée)” in Villes et culture sous l’Occupation: expériences françaises et perspectives compares (Paris 2012).

Jozefacka earned her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2011.

Samuel Johnson is the Director of Graduate Studies in Art History and the Carole & Alvin I. Schragis Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. His book, El Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919–1933, awarded a Leonard A. Lauder Publication Grant, treats El Lissitzky’s theoretical and practical engagement with print as an alternative to the production art paradigm outlined by Soviet theorists in the early 1920s. Essays include “El Lissitzky's Other Wolkenbügel: Reconstructing an Abandoned Architectural Project,” The Art Bulletin (September 2017); and “Ornement / masse: la troisième dimension du suprématisme,” in Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch : L’avant-garde russe à Vitebsk, 1918–1922 (Paris, 2018).

Vérane Tasseau’s Ph.D (Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne) studied the Kahnweiler sequestration sales held between 1921 and 1923; a project she began in 2014 at the Research Center, and which will soon be published. Tasseau was a Curatorial Assistant at the Musée National Picasso, Paris (Matisse Picasso, 2001; Picasso Surreal, 2005), and a research assistant at MoMA (Georges Seurat: The Drawings). Now a freelance art historian and curator, Tasseau also works part-time as a researcher for the Picasso Administration. With Cécile Godefroy, she edited a special issue on Picasso's working techniques for Cahiers d'Art (December 2015). She is author of Picasso, L’Art en question (Hazan, 2018). Tasseau was co-curator of the New York exhibition “A Foreigner called Picasso”, 2023-2024.

Trevor Stark was a 2014–16 Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in 2016. Stark's first book Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé (MIT Press, 2020) analyzes the status of language in European avant-garde art from Cubism to Dada in relation to the historical reception of the poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé. His recent publications include articles on Pablo Picasso, Chris Marker, Hugo Ball, and Marcel Broodthaers. He was a 2016–17 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and is currently Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary.