Meet the Staff

Predrag Dimitrijevic was born in Yugoslavia and came to the United States in 1984 to study, receiving his BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art and his MFA from Yale University. After a brief stint at The Met, Predrag returned to Yale University to teach printmaking and to hone his skills as an assistant to the conservator at the Yale Center for British Art. In 1997, Predrag joined The Met’s Department of Photographs. Both artist and technician, Predrag creates the specialized mats seen on Met photographs. He frames, handles, and installs exhibitions, and crafts specialized housings for daguerreotypes and other out-of-the-ordinary works.

Since joining The Met in 1997, Mia Fineman has organized numerous exhibitions spanning the history of photography, including Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography (2019), Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists (2017), Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (2012), On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag (2006), and Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection (2000). She has written on art and culture for the New York Times, Slate, Photograph, and other publications. Mia studied art history at Yale University, where she received a PhD in 2001 with a dissertation on German modernist photography.

Ryan Franklin received his BFA from The University of Texas, Arlington in 1997 and has applied his design and craft skills to preparing exhibitions for the Museum since 2011.

Virginia McBride contributes to the curatorial activities of the department and helps to coordinate its exhibition program. She first arrived at The Met as a summer intern, and since returning in 2018, she has provided research and support for all of the Museum’s photography shows. In 2020, she co-curated the exhibition Pictures, Revisited. Virginia is also a PhD candidate at Rutgers University, specializing in interwar photography and photomontage. She has previously held positions at the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Stephen C. Pinson returned to the Department of Photographs in 2015, having previously served as the Aaron and Betty Lee Stern Art History Fellow in 2002–3, when he helped organize the exhibition The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855 (2003). Stephen previously headed the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at the New York Public Library, and held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and at Columbia University. His many exhibitions span the history of photographic media and include, most recently, Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey (2019). He holds a PhD from Harvard University and is the author of Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L.J.M. Daguerre (2012).

Laura Povinelli received a BA in Art History from the University of Connecticut and an MA in Arts Administration from New York University. Since 2015, Laura worked as a Collections Manager and Rights and Reproductions Coordinator at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Prior to that, she was a Project Assistant at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in the Authentication Department.

Karan Rinaldo has been managing The Met’s Diane Arbus Archive since October 2008 and also oversees the Study Room for Photographs. Karan received a BA from Bucknell University, an MA in art history from Hunter College, and an MA in library science from Queens College. Prior to arriving at The Met, she gained experience in cataloguing, archival practice, and collections management at the Museum of Modern Art Library, the Graphic Arts Collection at the Princeton University Library, and the Museum of the City of New York. She previously worked in arts administration at the School of Visual Arts.

Jeff Rosenheim joined The Met in 1988. The author of ten books on Walker Evans, Jeff is the steward of the Walker Evans Archive, which the Metropolitan acquired in 1994. He is also the custodian of the Diane Arbus Archive. Rosenheim has a BA in American studies from Yale University, and an MFA in photography from Tulane University. He has lectured extensively, curated numerous exhibitions, such as Photography and the American Civil War (2013), and published essays on a wide range of artists including Carleton Watkins, Thomas Eakins, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore.

Elena Tarchi joined the department in 2017. She oversees daily operations and activities, and manages the department's friends group, the Alfred Stieglitz Society. Prior to The Met, she worked at Aperture Foundation, a publisher and center for photography. She graduated with a BS from Emerson College in 2012.

Bobby Walsh joined the Department of Photographs in 2019, after holding a temporary position in the department in 2018–19. He received a BFA in photography from Pratt Institute and an MA in photographic preservation and collections management from the joint program between the University of Rochester and George Eastman Museum. Prior to the Met, he worked as a collections associate at the Princeton University Art Museum.