Camila Aguayo
Camila Aguayo studies colonial Caribbean art with a focus on the visual culture produced on the island of Puerto Rico during the Spanish regime. Through her research, she has focused on the intersections of race, class, and identity, exploring how colonial legacies influenced artistic practices and the formation of different sociocultural narratives. By examining artworks produced within the colonial structure of Puerto Rico, she observes the role artists played in forging a national identity and creating a new visual culture for the island. Camila was recently a Hot Metal Bridge Fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, where she had previously graduated and received a B.A. in Art History and a B.S. in Marketing.
Sarah Brokenborough
Sarah Brokenborough is a Ph.D. student in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Sarah has previously completed a MA in the History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, a MA in Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and a BA in Comparative Women’s Studies at Spelman College. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on art, modernity, and diasporic identities in Brazil and the Caribbean, all while incorporating gender as a lens of analysis. By investigating the diffusion of material and textual knowledge, Sarah aims to broaden our understanding of Afro-Creole visual culture in the Atlantic World.
María Carrillo Marquina
María Carrillo Marquina is a Ph.D. student in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She focuses on the art and material culture of the African diaspora in the Spanish Americas with a particular interest in Afro-Latino artistic and religious expressions in colonial Mexico and Cuba. By investigating the visual culture of Black confraternities, she aims to nuance the understanding of Afro-Catholicism and broaden the existence of art in colonial Black communities. María earned her Master of Arts in Art History at the University of Delaware and her Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Arts Management at the College of Charleston Honors College.
Kaillee Coleman
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.
Hailee Corbin
Hailee Corbin earned her bachelor’s degree in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of California Santa Barbara. During her time at UC Santa Barbara, she began taking courses on Latin American Art, specifically that of precontact Mesoamerica and colonial Mexico. Her senior thesis explored the role that the systematic study of nature played in crafting early colonial liturgical objects, particularly in the well-known Hearst Chalice. Examining this object, and objects like it, brought to light how Nahua knowledge of the natural world became intertwined with Christian spiritual knowledge to advance Christianization efforts. She hopes to examine how these epistemological traditions influenced the development of a distinctly Nahua Christianity and how the development of this faith tradition changed art-making practices and the meaning of materials in colonial Mexico.
Xena Fitzgerald
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.
Claudia González-Díaz
Claudia González-Díaz is an M.A. student in Art History at Tulane University. She studies contemporary art that addresses the intersections between U.S. imperial politics and land transformation. At Tulane, she wishes to explore material culture theory to better understand how artists incorporate the materials derived from (un)natural disasters into their artwork. Claudia aims to root her analyses in lessons from diasporic Latinx Studies and Black Studies. She has completed internships at the National Portrait Gallery and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and has curated two group exhibitions, Home Bound (2023) and Record(ando) (2023). She graduated from Indiana University Bloomington in 2023 with B.A.s in Art History and French and a minor in Latino Studies.
Clare Gucwa
Clare Gucwa (she/her) is a writer, educator, museum professional, and a first-year PhD student in the Art History and Latin American Studies program at Tulane University. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art at Ohio University and her Master of Arts degree in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism, and Theory at the State University of New York, Purchase College. Clare has held curatorial roles in art, history, and science museums where she completed projects that increased access to art historical research on the construction of public art and public space within institutions. Her research interests include Latin American art of the twentieth century, Indigenous art, performance studies, and public practice. Her current research explores public art and performance in El Salvador and questions how collective spaces shape ideas and categories of art and artifact.
Nicole Jozwik
Nicole Jozwik is a Ph.D. student in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Her research focuses on the art and religion of the colonial Andes, specifically in Peru and Bolivia. She is currently pursuing research on the art and culture of colonial mitayo mining communities in Potosí, Bolivia. Nicole earned her Bachelor of Arts in Art History at Providence College. She received her Masters in the History of Art at the Pennsylvania State University. Nicole also received Quechua language and culture instruction from Centro Tinku, Cusco and the Ohio State University.
Marjorie Kennedy
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
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.
Aine Powers
Aine Powers is from the Boston area and is finishing up her senior year at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont where she majors in Art History and Global Security Studies. She is interested in artistic production under non-democratic governments, particularly in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her undergraduate thesis focused on re-interpreting The Wheat Sifters by Gustave Courbet as a political allegory of peasant inaction under the regime of Napoléon III in France. She is also passionate about museum work and is excited to be working as a curatorial intern at the Guggenheim this summer on an exhibition on Orphism in 1900s Paris before joining the Tulane community!
Maryluna Santos Giraldo
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.
Fei Xie
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.
Recent Alumni
Ada Evans
Ada Evans received her M.A. in Art History at Tulane University in 2024, with a thesis titled “Art of Waning Spaces: The Role of Materials in Imagining Coastal Climate Change.” 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. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Boston University.
Megan Flattley
Megan Flattley received her PhD in Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane in 2024 with a dissertation titled, “Out of the Fragments, New Worlds: Spatial and Social Construction in the Work of Diego Rivera, 1913-1933.” 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. She is currently a Forsyth Postdoctoral Fellow of Latin American Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Tali Gorodetsky
Tali Gorodetsky received her M.A. in Art History from Tulane University in 2024, with an M.A. thesis titled, “Silver threads: Dutch domestic objects during the colonial transition from New Netherland to New York.” Tali’s thesis focused 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 hoped 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
Elena Banafshe Johnson received her M.A. in Art History at Tulane University in 2024, with a thesis titled “Continuous threads: Structure-privileging and Andean thought in We Are Seven.” 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.
Cecilia Nogueira
Cecilia Nogueira received her M.A. in Art History from Tulane University in 2024, with an M.A. thesis titled, “Through the eyes of Salvator Rosa: Refuting the romantic interpretation through an analysis of the artist’s personal correspondence and philosophical inquiries.” 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 rejects 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
Catherine Nuckols received her PhD in Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane in 2024 with a dissertation titled, “Unfolding the sign: Iconicity and figuration in Maya full-figure inscriptions.” 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. She currently holds the Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Daniella Statia
Daniella Statia received her M.A. in Art History at Tulane University in 2024, with a thesis titled, “Searching for an African American artistic identity...in Mexico?: The art of Hale Woodruff, Elizabeth Catlett and Sargent Claude Johnson.” She focused 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.