BGC students, alumni, faculty and staff sprung into spring with wonderful new roles, exhibitions and research! And 23 BGC students are now alumni; congratulations to the class of 2026!
We’re celebrating new curatorial opportunities for BGC alums at lauded New York institutions: Ann Bell (MA ’14) is the new curator at New York Society Library, originally the Library of Congress when New York was the capital of the United States, where she will work closely with manuscripts and rare books, as well as contribute to the exhibition program. Grace Billingslea (MA ’22) is the new assistant curator and Art Bridges cohort project manager at the American Folk Art Museum. A big congratulations to Ann and Grace!
Associate professor Drew Thompson has been on leave during the 2025–26 academic year to serve as the Andrew W. Mellon Senior Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recently he curated a selection of photographs including some recent acquisitions on view now through early fall in Photographs from the Permanent Collection in the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery (gallery 850) in the Met. As an organizing exhibition theme, he considers the role of blackness as form and subject matter in histories of photography. The photographs span the 19th and 20th centuries and were taken in locations as diverse as Madagascar, South Africa, Brazil, and the US. According to Thompson, “The collection rotation offered the chance to work closely with The Met’s extensive photographic collections to further develop my curatorial practice. I worked with a range of administrative departments, including curatorial, conservation, and editorial, further enriching my understanding of photography as a medium of representation and artform. I am excited to take this experience to future curatorial and writing projects and to integrate these experiences into my teaching at BGC.” Congratulations Drew!
Emily Hayflick (MA ’20) returned to BGC to present a paper at “Sensing Matters: Objects, Experiences, and Objects,” a student-led symposium that explored how material objects become animated through sensory engagement and how our attention alters our understanding of them. Emily, who is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Cornell, gave a talk titled “One Whole Eagle: Assembling Eagle Bodies at the National Eagle Repository” on the panel “From Ephemeral to Accumulated.”
In April, Dare Turner (MA ’17), curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum, participated in an Institute of Fine Arts roundtable, “Weaving Histories into Futures: Art – People – Place.”
We got to hear from alumnae Barbara Paris Gifford (MA ’04), Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design at the Museum of Art and Design, and Pim Supavarasuwat (MA ’22), Director of Donald Heald Rare Books, about the lasting impacts of their studies at BGC in a new video shown at this year’s Iris Awards.
Current MA student Katrin Zimmermann, who worked as an intern with the Collections Department at Pitt Rivers Object Collections recently published “Portable Wealth, Wearable Memory: Encountering a Yemeni Labbeh” on the Pitt Rivers Collection website, which explores her research on this Yemeni bridal jewellery held at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Assistant professor Mei Mei Rado’s book, The Empire’s New Cloth (Yale University Press 2025), won the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for 18th Century Studies for an outstanding historical or critical study of the eighteenth century. Brava Mei Mei!
