Leonard A. Lauder is Chairman Emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. and the senior member of its Board of Directors. The Company is one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of quality skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products.

Mr. Lauder is highly involved in the worlds of art, education, politics and philanthropy. He currently serves as Chairman Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, to which he has donated hundreds of works of art. Additionally, he has been a major supporter of the University of Pennsylvania, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, among other organizations. He is also Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation.

The Lauder Family received the 2011 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in recognition of its long-standing commitment to philanthropy and public service.

In 2013, Mr. Lauder pledged his collection of Cubist art to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also provided significant support for the creation there of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art to advance the scholarship of early twentieth-century art.

© 2014 MMA, photograph by Jackie Neale

Neil Cox is Head of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, joining the Center in 2022 as its third leader after Rebecca Rabinow and Stephanie D’Alessandro. Previously, in the UK, he was Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), the University of Edinburgh, and before that Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. At Edinburgh he Directed the ARTIST ROOMS Research Partnership, a collaboration with Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, and was Director of Postgraduate Research for ECA. At Essex he was Head of Department three times and served a term as Chair of the Board of Trustees of Colchester-based contemporary visual arts organization Firstsite during its major capital build project.

His publications include Cubism (London, 2000) and The Picasso Book, (London, 2010). He also worked with Dawn Ades and David Hopkins on Marcel Duchamp (London, 1999, second revised edition, 2021). He has written journal articles and exhibition catalogue essays on Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism and desire, and on the sculpture and the drawings of Richard Serra. He has curated three exhibitions: A Picasso Bestiary (Croydon, 1995), Constable and Wivenhoe Park: Reality and Vision (Colchester, 2000), and In the Presence of Things: Four Centuries of European Still Life Painting, Part 2: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1840-1955, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon in 2011.

Jen Begazo is the Digital Programs Associate of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Lehman College, CUNY, and an M.A. in Social Design and Innovation from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Prior to joining The Met, Jen has applied her human-centered design methodologies across the globe in countries such as Kenya, France, India, Belgium, and the Netherlands. With particular interests in communication and intentional design, Jen seeks to broaden the reach of understanding and thinking across all boundaries and borders. At the Research Center, she manages the Instagram account, website, and external communications.

Laura joined the research center in November 2020 having previously fulfilled the role of Assistant Administrator in the Department of Paper Conservation. Prior to joining The MET, Laura gained years of fine art administration experience in multiple New York City art galleries and auction houses. At the research center she assists with managing the fellowship application and onboarding processes for the research center, and facilitating the research center’s activities including lectures, programs, and new initiatives. Laura holds a BFA in art history with MA coursework in fine arts administration from Savannah College of Art and Design.

Lauren Rosati is Assistant Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. Prior to joining The Met in 2018, she held curatorial positions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Academy Museum, and Exit Art. Her writing and criticism have appeared in books; edited volumes; exhibition catalogs for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art; peer-reviewed journals (The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, Leonardo); magazines (Art in America); and online. 

In the Research Center, she manages the Modern Art Index Project, organizes public programs, and contributes to departmental research initiatives. Her own research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of modernism, in particular the relation of visual art to sound, performance, media, science, and technology. Rosati holds a B.A. from the New School and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the City University of New York, Graduate Center.

Appointed the Museum’s Deputy Director for Collections and Administration in October 2018, Andrea Bayer was previously the Jayne Wrightsman Curator in the Department of European Paintings. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1990, and has been on the staff of The Met since that time.

An expert on Italian Renaissance art, she has worked on a range of exhibitions, both thematic investigations—such as Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy (2004) and Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008–9)—and monographic shows on artists such as Giambattista Tiepolo, Dosso Dossi, and Antonello da Messina. Her most recent exhibitions include Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, one of the inaugural exhibitions at The Met Breuer. She was a curator in European Paintings from 2007 to 2018, and, in 2014, became the Jayne Wrightsman Curator. Outside the department, Bayer served as Interim Deputy Director for Collections and Administration (May–October 2018), Interim Head of Education (2008–9), and for six years was coordinating curator for the Curatorial Studies program run jointly by the Museum and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She is currently co-chairman of the Director’s Exhibition Committee.

Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, Emily Braun has served as the Curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection since 1987. In addition to her writings on Cubism, she has published extensively on twentieth-century Italian art, including her book Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (2000) She is also the author of Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today Murals (1985) and co-curator of The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons (2005, Jewish Museum, New York) and co-author of its catalogue, which received a National Jewish Book Award. Her fellowships include a residency at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and a Senior Research Grant from the Getty Foundation. Most recently, she co-curated Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (2014–15). Its catalogue received The Association of Art Museum Curators’ First Place Award for Excellence and the New York State Historical Association’s Henry Allen Moe Prize. Curator of Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Braun also authored its publication, which was recognized with the 2016 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award.

© 2014 MMA, photograph by Jackie Neale

Stephanie D’Alessandro is the Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. In addition to her role in the department, from 2017-2021, she was also the Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. Before joining the Met in May 2017, D’Alessandro was the Art Institute of Chicago’s Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of International Modern Art. She has organized such major exhibitions as Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 (2010), Picasso and Chicago (2013), Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 (2014), Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil (2017), as well Surrealism Beyond Borders (2021-22). Her many publications include topics on German and Latin American modernism, Surrealism, as well as many artists, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. D’Alessandro received her B.A. from Dickinson College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

© 2017, photograph by Brooke Hummer Photography

Rebecca Rabinow is the Director of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. Prior to joining the Menil, Rabinow was the founding Curator in Charge of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. As a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curatorial staff from 1990–2016, Dr. Rabinow helped organize more than twenty special exhibitions at the Museum. Her most recent award-winning shows include The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde in 2011–12 (recipient of the Dedalus Foundation's inaugural Exhibition Catalogue Award and the Frick Center for the History of Collecting’s Biennial Prize), Matisse: In Search of True Painting in 2012–13, and Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection in 2014–15 (the catalogue of which won The Association of Art Museum Curators’ First Place Award for Excellence as well as the New York State Historical Association’s Henry Allen Moe Prize). A graduate of Smith College and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, Dr. Rabinow served as the Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum's Forum of Curators, Conservators, and Scientists in 2014–15.

Nancy J. Troy is Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art at Stanford University.  A specialist in modern art, architecture and design in Europe and America, Troy is the author of books about Dutch modernism, French decorative art, and the visual culture of haute couture.  Her latest book, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian, examines the posthumous circulation of this Dutch painter’s work in both elite and popular spheres.  Former editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin and former president of the National Committee for the History of Art, Troy has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Getty Research Institute, American Council of Learned Societies, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Sabrina Carletti holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, where she completed a dissertation on one of the central figures of the Argentinian avant-garde from the first half of the twentieth century, the multimedia artist Xul Solar (Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari, 1887-1963). Her study examines 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, Sabrina will expand her dissertation into a book manuscript. Her research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Program in Latin American Studies, the Department of Art & Archaeology, and the McGraw Center for Teaching & Learning at Princeton University. Prior to her academic work in the United States, Sabrina served as an instructor and director of theater and puppetry in Argentina.

Stephanie Huber received a PhD from the City University of New York, Graduate Center in 2022. Her dissertation, “Cultural Predicaments: Neorealism in The Netherlands, 1927–1945” brings together archival research and film theory to address an unsettling figurative painting style that conveyed modern alienation by perversely appropriating Dutch Old Master traditions and combining them with film aesthetics. She will use the fellowship year to transform her thesis into a book. Her research has been supported by grants from the Mellon Council for European Studies, Fulbright, and the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. Her peer-reviewed articles have been published in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and Moving Image Review and Art Journal, as well as a forthcoming issue of Modernism/Modernity. She has taught at Hunter College and Baruch College and previously had a fellowship at the Isamu Noguchi Museum.

Adri Kácsor is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. 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 bringing the figure of the migrant to the forefront of histories of European and Soviet modern art, her work seeks to rethink the relationship between avant-garde and socialist realist aesthetics. During her residency at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, Adri will complete her dissertation titled  “Migrant Aesthetics: Hungarian Artists in the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919-1956.” Prior to her doctoral studies, Adri studied journalism and history at the Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

Özge Karagöz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, where she is working on her dissertation, “Refiguring Art Across Revolutions: Turkish and Soviet Artists in Alliance, 1933–1938.” By recovering histories of artists and exhibitions traveling between Turkey and the Soviet Union, histories that were repressed during the Cold War era, this project seeks to decenter the analytical frameworks of modernism derived from Western European and North American artistic contexts. Studying the Turkish-Soviet artistic engagements of the 1930s will also lay the groundwork for examining post-WWII artistic networks between the Soviet Union and the newly decolonized Middle Eastern nations formerly under Ottoman rule. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Özge will resituate idioms of French modernism within Turkish-Soviet artistic debates to demonstrate their perceived aesthetic and political limits, as well as to illuminate the unexpected new meanings they gained while circulating globally.

Elizabeth Cowling is Professor Emerita in the History of Art and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where she taught for many years. She has published widely on European Modernism, especially Cubism, Primitivism and Surrealism, and specialised in the work of Picasso. Picasso: Style and Meaning (2002) won the 2003 British Academy Book Prize and Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose was named Apollo Book of the Year for 2006. She curated Picasso’s Late Sculpture: ‘Woman’ for the Museo Picasso, Málaga in 2009 and Picasso Portraits for the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Museu Picasso, Barcelona in 2016-17. The exhibitions she has co-curated include Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910-1930 (Tate Gallery, 1990), Picasso: Sculptor/Painter (Tate Gallery, 1994), Matisse Picasso (Tate, London; Grand Palais, Paris; MOMA, New York, 2002-3), and Picasso Looks at Degas (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2010-11).  She is co-curator with Emily Braun of the Met’s current exhibition Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition. Her current research focuses on the Cubists’ debt to the decorating trade.

Charles W. Haxthausen is Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Emeritus, at Williams College. In 2009 he was recipient of the College Art Association’s award for Distinguished Teaching of Art History. His exhibition Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid, which he curated for the Williams College Museum of Art in 2012, received an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art and art criticism with a focus on Germany. Books include Berlin: Culture and Metropolis (1990) and The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (2002). His translations, with extensive commentary, of the art criticism of Carl Einstein, A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.Haxthausen’s residency at the Lauder Research Center in 2019-2020 was cut short by the pandemic; he returns in the fall of 2022 to continue work on a book reassessing Paul Klee’s position in the European avant-garde.”

Pepe Karmel is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University. He assisted in the organization of Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (1989), and was co-curator for Picasso: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art (1997–98) and the retrospective Jackson Pollock (1998), all for the Museum of Modern Art. Karmel also curated the installation Dialogues with Picasso, currently on view at the Museo Picasso Málaga (through 2023). He has written about modern and contemporary art for numerous exhibition catalogues and journals, and is the author of two books: Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (Yale University Press, 2003) and Abstract Art: A Global History, forthcoming from Thames & Hudson in fall 2020. During his residency at the Research Center, he will be studying later Cubism, focusing on how the artistic interaction among Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris extended into the 1920s.

Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy, a former trustee of Tate (1995–2005) and of the National Gallery (2000–2005), and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2013 she was appointed CBE for services to higher education.

She has organized or co-curated numerous major exhibitions including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America: The Modern Era 1820-1980 (1989); Dalí’s Optical Illusions (2000); Salvador Dalí: The Centenary Exhibition (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (2006); Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Photography and Film (2008); and Dalí/Duchamp (2017–18). Apart from the catalogues associated with these exhibitions, her publications include Photomontage (1986), Marcel Duchamp (with N. Cox and D.Hopkins, 1999), A Dada Reader (2006), and Writings on Art and Anti-art (2015). During her residency, Ades continued her research on Surrealism and on the women of the New York avant-garde, ca. 1917.

© 2014, photograph by Carla Borel

Nicholas Sawicki is Associate Professor of Art History at Lehigh University. His principal area of research is early twentieth century European art and he is a specialist in modern Czech art. Sawicki has published extensively on modernism in Prague, as well as on the history of exhibitions, collecting, and transnational artistic exchange. He is the author of monographs on a group of Prague artists, the Eight (2014); the painter and printmaker Friedrich Feigl (2016); as well as recent articles on Max Brod, Vincenc Kramář, and Pablo Picasso. During his residency in the Research Center, he advanced work on a new book on modernist infrastructures in early twentieth century Prague, and a publication on the curatorial work of Douglas Cooper.

Adrian Sudhalter is a specialist in early twentieth century modernism, with a focus on Germany and Dada. Her research interests include the historiography of collage and the intersections between painting and photography. In 2016, she curated Dadaglobe Reconstructed, a major exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the accompanying catalogue was a finalist for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award for Museum Scholarship. Sudhalter has held curatorial positions at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and at MoMA, where she co-edited the scholarly volume Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (2008). At the Research Center, she completed the essay, “Collage as Symbolic Form: Margaret Miller, Collage, and the ‘Dislocations of War,’” which will be published in spring 2020.

Christopher Green is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art and a Fellow of the British Academy. Green’s scholarship on modernism, and Cubism in particular, has produced numerous publications, including Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928 (1987), which won the Mitchel Prize for a book on 20th Century art; Art in France 1900-1940 (2000); and Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (2005). He has also curated several recent exhibitions: Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (Tate Modern, 2005); Objetos vivos: Figura y natura muerta en Picasso (Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2008); Modern Antiquity: Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, Picabia (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011); Mondrian/Nicholson: In Parallel (The Courtauld Gallery, 2012); and Cubism and War: The Crystal in the Flame (Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 2016). At the Research Center, Professor Green advanced his book project which has the working title Cubism and Reality.

Alexandra Chiriac is an art historian specialising in histories of twentieth century modernism, with a focus on performance and design. She holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, 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 entitled Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022). Her peer-reviewed 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. Prior to her graduate studies, Chiriac worked at Sotheby’s and co-curated exhibitions at GRAD, a non-profit cultural platform for Russian and Eastern European arts based in London.

Hyewon Yoon holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she completed her dissertation Exile at Work: The Photographic Portraiture of Gisèle Freund, Lisette Model, and Lotte Jacobi, 1930–1955 in 2016. She teaches Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of New Hampshire. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Yoon will be working on her second book that explores the work of Alexey Brodovitch, an émigré from Russia best known for his role as the Art Director of Harper’s Bazaar by considering how his graphisme is derived from an aesthetic of pastiche that draws on the technical and formal resources of a variety of European avant-garde movements.  Yoon’s research has been supported by numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. Her essays include “Zum Thema des Porträts im Exil: Gisèle Freund in Frankfurt,” Fotogeschichte (Spring 2019) and “Practice in Color: Gisèle Freund in Paris,” October (Summer 2020).

Jason Mientkiewicz is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation examines the emergence of geometrical abstraction in Russia in the early-20th century through the work of the collective "Affirmers of the New Art" (UNOVIS). This project provides a critical history of the group, its expansion through rapidly restructuring art academies across the new Soviet state, and its participation in contemporary discourses concerning the role of art in the formation of revolutionary collective subjects. Shared by those affiliated with UNOVIS is a rigorous engagement with developments in avant-garde art in Western Europe—Cubism chief among them. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Jason will focus 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.

Jonathan Vernon received his Ph.D. from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, in 2019. His thesis 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 developed a manuscript that applies the same critical model to larger questions around how the fragment was retooled as part of the modernist canon and what it can tell us about the relationship between American art histories and Cold War ideology. Before joining the Research Center, Vernon was an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld (2018–19) and Ridinghouse Contributing Editor at the Burlington Magazine (2014–17). He is also a fellow of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the author of numerous publications devoted to twentieth-century sculpture and modernism as a whole.   

Meghan Forbes holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she completed her dissertation, “In the Middle of It All: Prague, Brno, and the Avant-Garde Networks of Interwar Europe” in 2016. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Meghan completed a book manuscript, which documents historical correspondence, travel accounts, and periodical publications related to previously overlooked networks of exchange between the Czech avant-garde and peers to the East and West. Forbes has received numerous fellowships in support of her work, including a Fulbright Award (2014–15). She is the editor of International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019) and co-curator of BAUHAUS↔VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels (Museum of Modern Art, 2018). Before joining the Research Center, Forbes was the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives Fellow at MoMA for Central and Eastern Europe.

Raphael Koenig completed his Ph.D.at Harvard University in 2018. His dissertation, titled “Art Beyond the Norms: Art of the Insane, Art Brut, and the Avant-Garde from Prinzhorn to Dubuffet (1922–1949)” focuses on the reception of self-taught artists by the French and German avant-gardes, and offers a critical examination of the notions of “art of the insane,” “modern primitives,” and “art brut.” As a Leonard A. Fellow, Koenig revised and expanded his dissertation into a monograph. He has published peer-reviewed articles on surrealism and art brut, the intersection of psychiatry, philosophy, and artistic creation, and contributed to several exhibition catalogues and journals. In 2018, he co-chaired the symposium “Art Brut, and Unclassifiable Object” at Bordeaux-Montaigne University; the proceedings of the symposium are forthcoming at Bordeaux University Press.

Giovanni Casini holds a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His dissertation, completed in 2018, focuses on the Paris-based dealer Léonce Rosenberg and the history of his Galerie L’Effort Moderne in the interwar period, touching on narratives of modernism, the history of collecting, the development of the art market, and the dealer as patron. During his residency at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, Casini expanded his doctoral dissertation and prepared a manuscript for publication. In 2016 Casini was a Fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York and the Guggenheim Museum's 2017–18 Hilla Rebay International Curatorial Fellow. In addition to his expertise and work on the interwar years, Casini has conducted research and published on art from the 1950s in England, Italy, and France.

Hilary Whitham Sánchez received her Ph.D. from the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation presents, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of avant-garde poet Tristan Tzara’s activities as a collector of African art in relationship to his role as the leader of the Parisian Dadaists. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Whitham Sánchez examined the role of Cubism and German Expressionism in shaping Tzara’s aesthetic theories, and triangulated the role African sculpture played in both movements with the early years of Dada in Zürich. Her research has been supported by a Penfield Fellowship and a Latner Travel Fellowship. Whitham Sánchez holds an M.A. from the City University of New York and a B.A. from Fordham University.

Luise Mahler is an art historian specializing in modern art and early twentieth-century art criticism. Mahler’s current project, a monographic book study, compares the different cubisms that emerged from the German-language writings of such figures as Carl Einstein and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler with those of their European contemporaries, Vincenc Kramář among them. Supported by a Josef Dobrovsky Fellowship of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Mahler will conduct research in archives across Prague this fall. Her recent publications include “Picasso Sculpture: A Documentary Chronology, 1902–1973” in Picasso Sculpture (2015), and contributions to the Museum’s exhibition catalogue Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (2014). In 2015 she co-chaired The Met’s symposium “Charting Cubism across Central and Eastern Europe.” Mahler holds an M.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York.

photograph by annako, Berlin

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.

Maria Castro is Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Castro’s writing and curatorial practice explores processes of cultural transatlantic exchange and the mobility of artworks, artists, and ideas between Europe and the Americas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, she advanced her dissertation titled, “Between São Paulo and Paris: Tarsila do Amaral and the Intersecting Identities of Antropofagia.” To be defended in 2019, it critically analyzes Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral’s construction of personal and national identity in her paintings of the 1910s–30s. Based on a dissertation chapter written during her fellowship at the Research Center, Castro’s essay “Both Paulista and Parisian: Racial Thinking in A negra” will be published in the forthcoming exhibition catalogue Tarsila Popular (Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2019).

Samuel Johnson is a specialist in the art and architecture of the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes. He is currently Assistant Professor and Carole & Alvin I. Schragis Faculty Fellow in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. His book manuscript, El Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919–1933, 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. His 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: Centre Pompidou, 2018).

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. Her essay “Private Rooms of the Cubist Still Life” will appear in fall 2018 in the edited volume Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature, and Design (1850–1920). In 2015 she co-chaired the symposium Charting Cubism across Central and Eastern Europe, and is currently preparing an essay on dealers and collectors of Parisian Cubism active in these regions of Europe for a forthcoming exhibition catalogue. Jozefacka earned her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2011.

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 (forthcoming) 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 Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary.

Vérane Tasseau graduated with a DEA in art history from Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne with a thesis on the relationship between French and American art in the 1950s. From 2001 to 2005, Tasseau worked as a curatorial assistant at the Picasso Museum, Paris, where she coordinated major exhibitions, including Matisse Picasso (2001, Tate Modern, London; Grand Palais, Paris; and MoMA, New York) and Picasso Surreal (2005, Beyeler Foundation Basel). In 2003, she received a grant from MoMA to assist with the reinstallation of the museum's permanent collection. Tasseau returned to MoMA in 2006 to work on the exhibition Georges Seurat: The Drawings. The Leonard A. Lauder Fellowship allowed Tasseau to pursue a research project on the four Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler sales held between 1921 and 1923 following the sequestration of his gallery's stock in 1914. Now a freelance art historian working in Paris and New York, Tasseau is also a part-time researcher for the Picasso Administration where she co-manages the library and writes for the Picasso Administration Journal. With Cécile Godefroy, she edited a special issue on Picasso's working techniques for Cahiers d'Art (December 2015).