Meet the Staff

Lee Berman joined The Met in 2023 as a Collections Specialist, Object Storage as part of the Tang Wing renovation. Previously to joining The Met, Lee spent several years freelance art handling at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery, The Grolier Club, Asia Society, NYPL and other institutions. From 2015 to 2020, he was the Manager Of Exhibition Installation at The Museum Of The City Of New York. Prior to that, from 2008 to 2015, he served as the gallery manager for the Davison Art Center and Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University. A practicing artist, Lee earned his BS in Fine Art/Printmaking from the University Of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

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.

 

Michaela Bubier joined The Met in 2022 and is responsible for managing the department’s friends group, The Modern Circle, and the Visiting Committee. Previously, she served as the Associate Director of Events at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston where she led public and community partner programs, development events, and major museum fundraisers from 2017-2022. She holds a BA in Arts Administration with a concentration in in Arts Management, Anthropology, and Painting from the University of Virginia.

Catherine Burns joined The Met in 2015. She is primarily responsible for coordinating acquisitions for the department. She also works closely with the curators and collections management staff on departmental loans and special exhibitions. A former Fulbright Fellow, she holds a BA in art history and German from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a master’s certificate in museum collections management and care from the George Washington University. Prior to joining The Met, she worked for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as well as the Morgan Library and Museum.

Iria Candela joined the department in 2014. Previously, she was Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, London, where she co-organized exhibitions such as Malevich (2014), Mira Schendel (2013), Gabriel Orozco (2011), and Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde (2010). Candela received her PhD from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and MA from Columbia University. At The Met, she curated the retrospectives Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms (2017) and Lucio Fontana. On the Threshold (2019), as well as the exhibition Julio Le Parc 1959 (2018). In addition, she organized Marisol: Self-Portrait Looking at the Last Supper (2014), and the 2020 Roof Garden Commission Héctor Zamora: Lattice Detour.

Mary Chan joined The Met in 2005, originally in the Department of European Paintings, with the primary responsibility of cataloguing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings. She has worked in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art since 2012, overseeing the research and documentation of the permanent collection for The Met online collection. Prior to The Met, she worked in the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She holds a BA in art history from Vassar College and an MA from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

Clare Davies has contributed to a wide range of research, programming, and archival projects related to art and photography in the Middle East since serving as associate curator of the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo between 2004 and 2006. She completed her doctoral dissertation on Egyptian modern art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and was subsequently awarded the inaugural Irmgard Coninx Prize Fellowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. She is the co-author of Robert Morris, Object Sculpture: 1960–65 (Yale UP, 2014) and has published regularly on contemporary art from the Arab world.

Stephanie D’Alessandro joined the Met in 2017. Previously, she was Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of International Modern Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and organized such exhibitions as Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 (2010), Picasso and Chicago (2013), Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 (2014), and Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil (2017). At the Met, she curated Surrealism Beyond Borders (2021). She has published widely on international modernism and in 2011 was a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. From 2017-21, in addition to her role in the department, she served as Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art and now sits on the Advisory Committee. D’Alessandro holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Olivia joined the department in 2021. In this role, she oversees the day-to-day coordination of the Leonard A. Lauder Chairman’s office. Before joining the department, she previously held positions at Alexandre Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, Queens Museum, and here at The Met in the Visitor Experience department. She received a BA in Art History from American University in 2017 and a MA in Museum Studies from New York University in 2020.

Cynthia Iavarone is responsible for the care and organization of the department’s permanent collection. In her current role, she facilitates all activities related to the galleries of The Met’s Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, as well as storage, in-house installations, and outgoing loans. She also manages the department’s technicians and collections management associates. Cynthia received her BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and MFA from Columbia University.

Alejandro Leal-Pulido first joined The Met as a Modern and Contemporary Art intern in 2021 and has worked in the department since March 2022. He supports the acquisitions process and other aspects of collections management, including imaging and rights and reproductions. He holds a BA in Art History from Hunter College and a MA in Museum Studies from the School of Professional Studies at the Graduate Center. Prior to joining The Met, he worked at the Museum of Arts and Design.

Brinda Kumar joined the Museum in 2015. Her curatorial projects at The Met include Nasreen Mohamedi (2016), Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (2018), Home Is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context (2019–20), Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (2020) and Gerhard Richter: The Birkenau Paintings (2020). Her responsibilities include conducting research, and lecturing on exhibitions and on the permanent collection. She is the author of several essays for museum catalogues, and has published articles from her doctoral research on the history of collecting. She holds a BFA in painting and printmaking; an MA at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; and an MA and PhD from Cornell University.

(also see the Department of European Paintings)

Denise, who joined The Met in January 2020, received her PhD in art history from Columbia University in 2014. She was the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery, (2014–2019), as curator of Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, and co-curator of its expansion at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Le modèle noir de Gericault à Matisse. 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. A past Mellon pre-doctoral researcher (Princeton University Art Museum) and Timeline of Art History essayist, she taught art history at Columbia University in New York and in Paris.

Sabine Rewald has organized many exhibitions, including Max Beckmann in New York (2016), Humor and Fantasy: The Berggruen Paul Klee Collection (2016), Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations (2013), Rooms with a View: The Open Window in Nineteenth-Century Art (2011), Glitter and Doom: Germany Portraits of the 1920s (2006), Max Ernst: A Retrospective (2005), and Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers (2001). She has authored several collection catalogues, including Twentieth-Century Modern Masters: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection and The American Matisse: The Dealer, His Artists, His Collection: The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection. She was a curator from 1984–2021 and is now curator emerita. She holds a PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Mallory Roark joined the department in 2019, where she primarily supports the research and documentation of the department’s permanent collection. Prior to joining The Met’s Modern and Contemporary staff, she interned in the Department of Drawings and Prints from 2018 to 2019 and previously held positions at Sean Kelly Gallery and College Art Association. She holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College (2013) and an MA from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts (2019).

Abraham Thomas joined the department in 2020. Previously, he worked at the Smithsonian Institution (2016–20) where he was curator-in-charge of the Renwick Gallery, and then senior curator at the Arts and Industries Building. Prior to this—based in London—he was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2005–13), and the director of Sir John Soane’s Museum (2013–15). His exhibitions at the Smithsonian included Futures (2021) and Disrupting Craft (2018); and at the V&A, Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary (2012), 1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces (2010), and Owen Jones: A Higher Ambition (2009). For the Sainsbury Centre in the UK he also co-curated Superstructures: The New Architecture 1960–1990 (2018).

Akili Tommasino joined The Met in 2021. Previously, he held curatorial positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A former Fulbright Fellow at the Centre Pompidou, he is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, where he earned his MA and BA.

Prior to joining The Met in 2018, Lauren Rosati held curatorial positions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Academy Museum, and Exit Art. She has contributed to a wide range of projects and exhibitions, including Oliver Beer: Vessel Orchestra (2019) at The Met Breuer, which she co-organized. Her lectures and publications focus on the interdisciplinary study of modernism, in particular the relation of modern art to sound, performance, media, science, and technology. Rosati holds a PhD from the City University of New York, Graduate Center.

Michaela Warshaw is a Collections Specialist working on the Tang Wing project. Before joining the Modern & Contemporary Department in 2022 she was also an intern in Medieval Art at the Met in 2019. Additionally, she has worked at the American Museum of Natural History on the renovation of the Museum’s Northwest Coast Hall. A graduate of Barnard College, she also holds an M.A. in Museum Anthropology from Columbia University.

Katy Uravitch joined The Met in 2015 as the Project Manager for The Met Breuer.  While there she oversaw all forty-eight Exhibitions.  She is currently managing the Modern and Contemporary Art Department's operations, including exhibitions and rotations, budget, collection, administration, and capital projects. She supervises all aspects of the administrative and support staff and is also responsible for departmental fiscal activities, including the operating budget, donor funds, acquisitions, human resources, and gallery maintenance.  Prior to The Met, she worked at The Rubin Museum of Art, New York and The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.