Alumni
Note: Alumni are listed by the year in which the degree was conferred. MAs are listed after PhDs.
Taryn Ely - PhD 2024
Dissertation: “Feminist Cinema Therapies: Neurodivergence in Women's Experimental Film”
Byron Fong - PhD 2024
Dissertation: “Interactive Forms of Movement: Video Game Aesthetics from 1985 to 1994”
Current Position: Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Program in Digital Media Studies at the University of Rochester
Madeline Ullrich - PhD 2024
Dissertation: “Television and the Forms of Feminist Feelings”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Popular Culture and Media in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma
Amanda Ju - PhD 2023
Dissertation: “More Than Oneself: Realism, Subjectivity, and Gender in Contemporary Chinese Art”
Current Position: Lecturer in Contemporary Art in the History of Art Department at London’s Global School
Almudena Escobar López - PhD 2023
Dissertation: “Common Forms: Archives and Ancestrality in Experimental Cinema”
Current Position: Assistant Professor in the School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University
Julia Tulke - PhD 2023
Dissertation: “Artist-Run Athens: Mapping Spaces of Critical Practice Between Two Crises, 2009-2022”
Current Position: Assistant Teaching Professor in the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University
Clara Auclair - PhD 2022
Dissertation: "Collected Memory: Histories of the French Film Industry in Fort Lee, New Jersey"
Current Position: Lecturer at DIS Stockholm
Mimi Cheng - PhD 2022
Dissertation: “China on the Horizon: German Orientalism in the Visual Field, 1859-1914”
Current Position: Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.
Alicia Chester - PhD 2022
Dissertation: “‘Study Nature Not Books’: A Genealogy of Photography on the Mind and Brain”
Current Position: Executive Assistant at Snøhetta
Victoria Gao - PhD 2022
Dissertation: “By the Road: Photography, Film, and Reimagining the American Road Narrative”
Current Position: Director, Bannister Gallery and Exhibitions, Rhode Island College
Peter Murphy - PhD 2022
Dissertation: “Queer Figurations: Painting After Queer Theory"
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum
Alisa Prince - PhD 2022
Dissertation: “Can’t Kill the Soul: The Value of Black Vernacular Photographs in the Domestic Archive and Beyond”
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Boston University
Lauren DiGiulio - PhD 2021
Dissertation: “Circling the Sign: Pattern and Gesture in Late Twentieth Century Performance”
Current Position: Creative Producer at Sweat Variant, Ltd
Jiangtao Harry Gu - PhD 2021
Dissertation: “A Nation in Prospect: Photography and the Making of Modern China”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Tracy Stuber - PhD 2021
Dissertation: “Photo Processing: Pictures in the American Social Landscape, 1973-1982”
Current Position: Digital Humanities Specialist at Harvard University
Patrick Sullivan - PhD 2021
Dissertation: “TV Sound in the Network Era, 1952-1984”
Current Position: Assistant Professor in Performance and Visual Studies at Texas A&M
Alana Wolf Johnson - PhD 2021
Dissertation: “‘How Noisy is New York?': Mapping Sensation and Sonic Signatures of the Modern Metropolis, 1920-1930”
Joel Neville Anderson - PhD 2020
Dissertation: “Self-Documentary in Community: Private Images Against Neoliberal Enclosure”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College
Jerome Dent - PhD 2020
Dissertation: “Of Figures and Failure: Blackness and the Topographies of the Imagination”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Tulane University
Eitan Freedenberg - PhD 2020
Dissertation: “Rebuilding: Architectural Reproduction in America, 1900-1945”
Current Position: Assistant Director of Programming at the Rochester Education Justice Initiative
Tara Najd Ahmadi - PhD 2019
Dissertation: “Unfinished: Art, Film, and Revolution in Iran, 1979”
Current Position: Independent scholar, artist, and filmmaker
Christopher Patrello - PhD 2018
Dissertation: “Indigenous Accounts: Local Exchange and Global Circulation on the Northwest Coast”
Current Position: Assistant Curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science
Hend Alawadhi - PhD 2017
Dissertation: “Tracing Trauma: Gender, Memory, and Erasure in Contemporary Arab Cinema”
Current Position: Assistant Professor in the College of Architecture at Kuwait University
Tiffany Barber - PhD 2017
Dissertation: “Undesirability and the Value of Blackness in Contemporary Art”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California-Los Angeles
Abigail Glogower - PhD 2017
Dissertation: “Drawn Together: Collective Representation in United States Visual Culture 1815-1860”
Current Position: Research and Instruction Archivist at Mount Holyoke
Berin Golonu - PhD 2017
Dissertation: “Modernizing Nature/Naturalizing Modernism: Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republican Landscape Imagery, 1876-1939”
Current Title and Organization: Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at SUNY Buffalo
Alexander Brier Marr - PhD 2017
Dissertation: “Aesthetics of Dwelling: Architecture in Native American Art, 1904-1945”
Current Position: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Native American Art at the St. Louis Art Museum
Jenevive Nykolak - PhD 2017
Dissertation: “Painting in Question, 1967-1981: 'BMPT,' Supports/Surfaces, and ja-na-pa”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at California State University, Los Angeles
Ruben Yepes-Munoz - PhD 2017
Dissertation: “Affecting the Conflict: Mediations of the Colombian War in Contemporary Art and Film”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Art History at Georgia College & State University
Lina Zigelyte - PhD 2017
Dissertation: “Queer Departures: Migration, Sexuality, and the Avant-Garde”
Current Position: Senior UX Researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Ryan Conrath – PhD 2016
Dissertation: “Bodies In Between: The Corporeal Poetics of Montage”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English at Salisbury University
Alicia Inez Guzmán – PhD 2016
Dissertation: “Connected in Isolation: Land and Landscape in New Mexico and the Greater Southwest”
Current Position: Staff writer at Searchlight New Mexico
Erin Leary – PhD 2016
Dissertation: “Decorating for Discrimination: Nativism and Eugenics in American Decorative Arts and Design, 1893-1924”
Paula Pinto – PhD 2016
Dissertation: “Condemned to Invisibility? Antonio Canova and the Impact of Photographic Reproduction on the History of Art”
Cesare Antonio Wright – PhD 2016
Dissertation: “Re-Framing 'Ecstatic Truth'-Experiments in the New Visual Language of Werner Herzog”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Communications at University of St. Thomas, Texas; Founder and President of Kino-Eye Center; Independent filmmaker
Iskandar Zulkarnain – PhD 2015
Dissertation: “Programming Archipelago: Digital Visual Cultures and Nationalism in Indonesia”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Alexandra Alisauskas – PhD 2014
Dissertation: “Deforming the 'Homo Sovieticus': The Collective Subject in Polish Art (1982-1992)”
Current Position: Learning and Engagement Librarian at University of Calgary
Rebecca Burditt – PhD 2014
Dissertation: “Hollywood's 'Commercial Moments': Seeing Difference in the Postwar Era”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Media and Society, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Amanda Graham – PhD 2014
Dissertation: “The Myth of Movement: Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown Dancing on the New York City Grid, 1970-1980”
Current Position: Independent artist
Kyoung-Lae Kang – PhD 2014
Dissertation: “Guilt Cinema: Memory, Boundaries, and Ethical Criticism in Postcolonial Korea”
Current Position: Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts at Seoul National University of Science and Technology
Sohl Lee – PhD 2014
Dissertation: “Images of Reality/Ideals of Democracy: Contemporary Korean Art, 1980s-2000s”
Current Position: Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University
Jessica McDonald – PhD 2014
Dissertation: “Relocating Rochester: A Critical Historiography of American Photography in the 1960s and '70s”
Current Position: the Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography for the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
Shota Ogawa – PhD 2014
Dissertation: “Zainichi Koreans (Koreans in Japan): A Cinematic History”
Current Position: Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities at Nagoya University
Jessica Horton – PhD 2013
Dissertation: “Places to Stand: History, Memory and Location in Native North American Art”
Current Position: Associate Professor and Director of the CTPhD Program at the University of Delaware
Lucy Mulroney – PhD 2013
Dissertation: “Andy Warhol, Publisher”
Current Position: Associate Director for Collections, Research, and Education at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University
Maia Dauner – PhD 2012
Dissertation: “Playing Dead: Corporeal Confusion and Performance Art”
Current Position: Analytic Consulting Specialist at Concentrix
Mara Gladstone – PhD 2012
Dissertation: “Sensing the Museum: Contests of Experience with Contemporary Art”
Current Position: Associate Curator at Palm Springs Art Museum
Gloria Kim – PhD 2012
Dissertation: “Transmissions: Public Health Information Campaigns and Ambient Media in the Era of Global Health Under U.S. Health Security”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies at University of California, Riverside
Bo Zheng – PhD 2012
Dissertation: “The Pursuit of Publicness: A Study of Four Chinese Contemporary Art Projects”
Current Position: Associate Professor at School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong
Dinah Holtzman – PhD 2011
Dissertation: “Portrait of the Postmodern Artist as Hysteric”
Current Position: Lecturer in American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington
Hossein Khosrowjah – PhD 2011
Dissertation: “Unthinking the National Imaginary: The Singular Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami”
Current Position: Senior Adjunct for the History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of the Arts & Saint Mary's College of California
Godfre Leung – PhD 2011
Dissertation: “The White Wall in Postwar Art: The Aesthetics of the Exhibition Space”
Current Position: Visiting Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, The University of British Columbia
Nicola Mann – PhD 2011
Dissertation: “The Death and Resurrection of Chicago's Public Housing in the American Visual Imagination”
Current Position: Professor of Communications and Visual Cultures and
Head of Department of Communications at Richmond, The American International University in London
Taro Nettleton – PhD 2011
Dissertation: “Throw Out the Books, Get Out in the Streets: Subjectivity and Space in Japanese Underground Art of the 1960s”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art at Temple University, Japan Campus
Pass, Victoria – PhD 2011
Dissertation: “Strange Glamour: Fashion and Surrealism in the Years Between the World Wars”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Art History at Maryland Institute College of Art
Aubrey Anable – PhD 2010Dissertation: “Digital Decay: The Urban Interface in New Visual Culture, 1968-2008”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carlton University
Lyell Davies – PhD 2010
Dissertation: “Expose, Impel, and Sustain Change: The Committed Documentary in Political Life”
Current Position: Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Aviva Dove-Viebahn – PhD 2010
Dissertation: “Looking for Pleasure: Art, Spectatorship, and Desire in Televisual Age”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University
Margot Bouman – PhD 2009
Dissertation: “A Broken Piece of an Absent Whole: Experimental Video and its Spaces of Production and Reception”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at The New School
Leanne Gilbertson – PhD 2009
Dissertation: “Bodies Out of Time in Place: Queerly Present in Andy Warhol's Factory and Beyond”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art at Montana State University Billings
Randy Innes – PhD 2009
Dissertation: “On the Limits of the Work of Art: The Fragment in Visual Culture”
Current Position: Senior Advisor, Social and Cultural Sector at Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
Elizabeth Kalbfleisch – PhD 2009
Dissertation: “Bordering on Feminism: Home and Transitional Sites in Recent Visual Culture and Native Women's Art”
Current Position: Independent researcher and consultant
Lisa Uddin – PhD 2009
Dissertation: “Breeding Grounds: Race, Space and Species in the New American Zoo”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Studies at Whitman College
Elizabeth Czach – PhD 2008
Dissertation: “Careless Rapture: Artifacts and Archives of the Home Movie”
Current Position: Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts - English & Film Studies Department at University of Alberta
Akiko Mizoguchi – PhD 2008
Dissertation: “Reading and Living Yaoi: Male-Male Fantasy Narratives as Women’s Sexual Subculture in Japan”
Current Position: Part time Lecturer in the Department of Art Studies at Tama Art University
Derya Özkan – PhD 2008
Dissertation: “The Misuse Value of Space: Spatial Practices and the Production of Space in Istanbul”
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at Izmir University of Economics
Marc Léger – PhD 2007
Dissertation: “Subjectivity and Social Space in Critical Public Art”
Current Position: Independent scholar
Norman Vorano – PhD 2007
Dissertation: “Inuit Art in the Qallunaat World: Modernism, Museums and the Popular Imaginary, 1949-1962”
Current Position: Department Head, Associate Professor of the Department of Art History & Art Conservation at Queen’s University
Lucy Curzon – PhD 2006
Dissertation: “Re-placing Modernism: Visual Culture and National Identity in Britain, 1930-1960”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama
Daniel Humphrey – PhD 2006
Dissertation: “Subjective Others/Foreign Selves: Queer American Spectatorship and Swedish 'Art Cinema'”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University
Daniela Sandler – PhD 2006
Dissertation: “Counterpreservation: Decrepitude and Memory in the Architecture of Berlin since 1989”
Current Position: Associate Professor - Department of Architecture, Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence, School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo
T'ai Smith – PhD 2006
Dissertation: “Weaving Work at the Bauhaus: The Gender and Engendering of a Medium, 1919-1937”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art History at The University of British Columbia
Lisa Soccio – PhD 2006
Dissertation: “Nothing's Shocking: On the Persistence of Avant-Gardism in Alternative Music”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art History at College of the Desert
Michael Williams – PhD 2006
Dissertation: “Beyond Death: Perversity, Relationality, Virtuality”
Current Position: Lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design
Catherine Zuromskis – PhD 2006
Dissertation: “Intimate Exposures: The Private and Public Lives of Snapshot Photography”
Current Position: Associate Professor at the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology
Matthew Brower – PhD 2005
Dissertation: “Animal Traces: Early North American Wildlife Photography”
Current Position: Lecturer and Curator, Museum Studies and Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto
Dore Bowen – PhD 2004
Dissertation: “Danger Box: Fluxphotography and Martin Heidegger’s Phenomenology”
Current Position: Research Professor in Art History in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University
Lisa Finn – PhD 2004
Dissertation: “Risky Subjects: Constructions and Categorizations of Women in Health Care”
Current Position: Support Specialist at Hammersmith Support
Amy Herzog – PhD 2004
Dissertation: “Dreams of Differences and Songs of the Same: The Image of Time in Musical Film”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Music, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Film Studies at CUNY
Matthew Reynolds – PhD 2004
Dissertation: “Soft Focus: Glamour and the Hollywood Redevelopment Project”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Studies at Whitman College
Reni Celeste – PhD 2003
Dissertation: “The Tragic Screen: Cinema at the Limits of Philosophy”
Current Position: Reni was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Teaching Fellow at Yale University until her passing in 2005
Jonathan Finn – PhD 2003
Dissertation: “Police Photography: Visual Representation, Scientific Evidence, and the Construction of the Criminal”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfred Laurier University
Cyril Reade – PhD 2003
Dissertation: “Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual Case Studies of Jewish Life in Berlin”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University–Camden
C. Ondine Chavoya – PhD 2002
Dissertation: “Orphans of Modernism: Chicano Art, Public Representation, and Spatial Practice in Southern California”
Current Position: Professor of Art History at the University of Texas-Austin
Bridget Cooks – PhD 2002
Dissertation: “Seen and Not Seen: A History of Black Representation and Self-Representation in Art Exhibitions in the United States, 1883-1998”
Current Position: Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and Department of Art History at University of California, Irvine
Darby English – PhD 2002
Dissertation: “Black Artists, Black Work? Regarding Difference in Three Dimensions”
Current Position: Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago
Natasha Goldman – PhD 2002
Dissertation: “Missing Absence: Trauma and National Memorials to the Holocaust”
Current Position: Research Associate in Art History at Bowdoin College
Karen Keiko Kosasa – PhD 2002
Dissertation: “Critical Sights/Sites: Art Pedagogy and Settler Colonialism in Hawai'i”
Current Position: Associate Professor & Director of Museum Studies Graduate Program at University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Kirsi Peltomaki – PhD 2002
Dissertation: “Strategies of Institutional Critique in Recent American Art”
Current Position: Professor of Art and Art History at Oregon State University
Tina Takemoto – PhD 2002
Dissertation: “Traumatic Repetition: Mimicry, Melancholia, Performance”
Current Position: Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of Art, San Francisco
Warren Zanes – PhD 2002
Dissertation: “Globalization and the Anxious State of a New Regionalism”
Current Position: Musician, Author, and Music Adjunct Faculty at New York University
Mark Edward Denaci – PhD 2001
Dissertation: “The Thick of Things: Framing, Fetishism, and the Work of Art History”
Current Position: Associate Professor of Art & Art History at St. Lawrence University
Hanneke Grootenboer – PhD 2001
Dissertation: “The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Still Life and Trompe l'Oeil Painting”
Current Position: Professor and Chair of the History of Art Department at Radboud University, Netherlands
Laura Quinn – PhD 2001
Dissertation: “Telling It Slant: Historic House Museums and the Re-Creation of the Past”
Current Position: Non-Profit Consultant at Laura Quinn Consulting
Jeanette Roan – PhD 2001
Dissertation: “Fictions of Faraway Places: Travel, Exoticism, and Cinema from High Imperialism to Global Culture”
Current Position: Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of Art, San Francisco
Phillip Gentile – PhD 2000
Dissertation: “Pugilistic Occasions: Cultural Constructions of Boxing in Painting, Film, and Television”
Bethany Ogdon – PhD 2000
Dissertation: “On the Subject of Reality Television”
Current Position: Professor in the Art Department at Austin Community College
Anna Williams – PhD 2000
Dissertation: “Nothing but Bodies: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Animals in George Cuvier's System and U.S. Industrial Meat Production”
Brian Goldfarb – PhD 1998
Dissertation: “Media Pedagogy: Institutional Discipline, Cultural Dissidence, and Electronic Media Culture”
Current Position: Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at UC San Diego
Alla Efimova – PhD 1998
Dissertation: “Communist Nostalgia: On Society Aesthetics and Post-Soviet Memory”
Current Position: Independent Art Historian, Curator, Consultant
Grant Kester – PhD 1997
Dissertation: “The Faculty of Possession: Property and the Aesthetic in English Culture”
Current Position: Professor of Visual Arts at UC San Diego
Rochelle Steiner – PhD 1997
Dissertation: “Framing Words: Visual Language in Contemporary Art”
Laura Marks – PhD 1996
Dissertation: “The Skin of the Film: Experimental Cinema and Intercultural Experience”
Current Position: Grant Strate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver
Lianne McTavish – PhD 1996
Dissertation: “Complicating Categories: Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century French Visual Culture”
Current Position: Professor of History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta
Walid Raad – PhD 1996
Dissertation: “Beirut...à la folie: A Cultural Analysis of the Abduction of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s”
Current Position: Professor of Art at The Cooper Union
Howard Singerman – PhD 1996
Dissertation: “The Discourse of the Artist in the University”
Current Position: Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Chair of Art and Art History at Hunter College, The City University of New York
George Dimock – PhD 1994
Dissertation: “Constructions of Childhood”
Current Position: Associate Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Lev Manovich – PhD 1994
Dissertation: “The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Virtual Reality”
Current Position: Presidential Professor of The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)
Barbara Miller – PhD 1993
Dissertation: “Postmodernism: Artistic Ploy or Cultural Response?: A Visual and Textual Analysis of Fragmentation and Layering in Postmodern Art and Dominant Cinema”
Current Position: Professor of Art History at Western Washington University
Ouma Amadou – MA 2023
Tierney Hamilton – MA 2023
Tristan Menzies – MA 2020
Amanda McFarland – MA 2017
Kelly Long – MA 2015
Current Position: Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Zainab Saleh – MA 2014
Current Position: Program Coordinator for Partnership for the Public Good (PPG)
Erin Flaherty – MA 2012
Current Position: Major Gift Officer at The College of New Jersey
Ryan Randall – MA 2012
Current Position: Librarian, Instruction Coordinator, and Faculty Outreach at College of Western Idaho
Zachary Rottman – MA 2012
Current Position: Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute
Genevieve Waller – MA 2012
Current Position: Founder of DARIA: Denver Art Review Inquiry & Analysis
Lauren Crabtree – MA 2009
Lucia Sommer – MA 2009
Derek Rushton – MA 2009
Yuichiro Kugo – MA 2008
Peter Hobbs – MA 2007
Current Position: Instructor, Faculty of Art at OCAD University
Linda Edwards – MA 2006
Amy Athey McDonald – MA 2000
Current Position: Associate Vice President for Communications and Strategy at the University of Rochester