Art History Graduate Students

Kaillee Coleman is a Ph.D. student in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Her research focuses on contemporary Caribbean art and cultural production, with special emphasis on the Black Atlantic and diaspora studies. From 2021-2022, she was the recipient of U.S. Dept. of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship in Haitian Creole. Additionally, she was the 2022-2023 recipient of the William J. Griffith Award for Outstanding Teaching Assistant in Latin American Studies, awarded by the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Her ongoing dissertation project is entitled “When I Am Not Here, Estoy Allá: Visualizing Expansive Space-Time in Caribbean Diasporic Memory.” She earned an M.A. degree in Latin American Studies from Tulane University and B.A. degrees in Art History and Interdisciplinary Art (specializations in Visual Art and Theatre) from Seattle University.

Ada Evans is an M.A. student in Art History at Tulane University. She centers her research on contemporary eco art, exploring how climate instability and large-scale ecological systems can be visualized through artistic practice. Her master’s thesis focuses on contemporary eco art engaged with oceanic climate change and investigates the role of organic materials in imagining sea-level rise and coastal land loss. By interrogating the role of eco art in the Anthropocene, she hopes to clarify the ways art can communicate complex climatic data, influence individual and collective behavior, and invoke an environmental ethic of reciprocity. Ada earned her Bachelor of Arts in Art History with a minor in Environmental Issues at Colorado College.

Xena Fitzgerald is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Xena’s research addresses the intersections of visual art and performance in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a focus on the Society of Jesus. By investigating how Jesuits in Peru mobilized sculpture and other objects to promote their local and global missionary ambitions, Xena’s dissertation project advances an interdisciplinary approach to object mobility in the context of early modern performance. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Grinnell College and her M.A. in art history from SMU.

Megan Flattley is a PhD Candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies. Her dissertation centers on the pictorial and architectural space of the murals of Mexican artist Diego Rivera and its relation to both the pre-Conquest Mexican artistic tradition as well as to international discourses of revolutionary art in the 1920s and 1930s. At Tulane, Megan completed the two-year Andrew W. Mellon fellowship in Community-Engaged Scholarship, the result of which was her contribution to the Newcomb Art Museum's 2019 exhibition, Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana. She has published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies, the Social Enterprise Journal, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and the public humanities site Smarthistory.

Tali Gorodetsky is a M.A. student in Art History at Tulane University. Tali’s thesis focuses on the persistence of Dutch cultural traditions following the transfer of colonial power from Dutch New Netherland to English New York. By comparing colonial estate inventories between 1650 and 1710 CE, Tali hopes to highlight the often-forgotten legacy of Dutch craftsmanship in colonial American decorative arts of the Northeast. Tali also earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and International Relations from Tulane University. Tali also attended the Institute of Cultural Heritage, International Law, and the Arts in Siena, Italy in conjunction with Tulane Law School.

Elena Banafshe Johnson is an M.A. student in Art History focusing on colonial Andean textiles. She is interested in technical art history, craft theory, and issues of access. Elena has a BA in Comparative Languages and Linguistics with emphasis on Latin and Spanish from Earlham College.

Marjorie Kennedy is an M.A. student in Art History at Tulane University. Her primary research focus is the Italian Renaissance, examining the influence of intellectual and artistic movements on themes and pictorial devices in painting. Her undergraduate research considered Piero di Cosimo, and his influence on the Italian Mannerist movement. Her master's thesis will expand her study of Piero di Cosimo’s work in relation to humanism, religion, and alchemy. Through an investigation of this interplay, she hopes to foster a greater understanding of Piero’s unique imagery. Marjorie earned her Bachelor of Arts in Art History & Criticism with a minor in French at Webster University.

Katie Margerison is an M.A. student in Art History at Tulane University. Her research focuses on the social history of modern art in the Americas, with a specific interest in the dynamics of identity and cultural formation in post-revolutionary Mexico. Her work examines topics such as official culture and heritage production, museological practices, colonial legacies, global Modernist networks, and Avant-Garde movements. Katie earned her B.A. in Art History and Museum Studies at New College of Florida.

Cecilia Nogueira is an M.A. student in the 4+1 program at Tulane University. Throughout the past year she has been researching seventeenth-century Italian art. Her thesis centers around a single artist, Salvator Rosa, who is most known for his melancholic landscapes. Her thesis focuses on Rosa’s self-portraits, figural landscapes and figural paintings, exploring their connection to Stoic philosophy and the artist’s personal accounts. By analyzing Rosa’s corpus through this lens, she hopes to reject the eighteenth-century Romantic interpretation of his paintings. Cecilia earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Tulane University with a major in Art History and a minor in Economics.

Catherine Nuckols is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Catherine’s dissertation focuses on full-figure hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Maya during the eighth century CE, examining how these inscriptions exemplify both linguistic content and visual complexity. By investigating the ways in which art and writing intersect, she hopes to advance understanding of Maya visual culture as it reflects in hieroglyphic writing. Catherine earned her Master of Arts in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin and her Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Studies at Brigham Young University.

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Maryluna Santos Giraldo received her bachelor's degree in History from Universidad Católica Argentina, located in Buenos Aires. In 2023, she finished her master's degree in Art History at University College London. This followed her initial master's degree in Art History from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2020. She is currently a Ph.D. Student at Tulane in Art History and Latin American Studies, where her doctoral research focuses on tracing the Indigenous and Black communities’ presence in the architecture that has been traditionally characterized as Mudéjar.

Daniella Statia is a M.A. student in Art History at Tulane University. She focuses her research on Blackness and Indigeneity in Modern art of the Americas, specifically examining the intersectionality and exchange between the two communities. Her master’s thesis investigates an instance of this exchange, where three Black North American artists traveled to Mexico in the 1940s during Mexico’s Public Art movement. Daniella earned her Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Spanish Studies at University of Delaware.

Fei Xie is an M.A. student in Art History at Tulane University. Her research focuses on the silk production and circulation of Manila Galleon trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By centering the materiality of silk in a global framework, she hopes to explore the lesser known transoceanic connection between colonial Latin America and the Pacific through the lens of objects. She is also interested in navigating the role of women in this trade, which manifests in transnational ways of patronage, artisanal and intermarriage. Fei earned her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and English Literature Studies at St. John’s College.