Current and Past Scholars
Scholars and fellows in residence under the Getty Scholars Program join a lively cohort of researchers and professionals hosted across the Getty campuses. In addition to the applications for the annual theme, there are separate open calls for the Getty Scholars Program at the Villa and the Getty Conservation Institute. Certain categories, such as Guest Scholars, the President's International Council Scholars, Connecting Art Histories Scholars, and Museum Scholars, are nominated by invitation only.
In addition, each year a Consortium Scholar is selected from the cohort to teach a seminar oriented around the annual theme, which is open via application to graduate students in Southern California. The Consortium Scholar must be affiliated with a Southern California university.
In past years, the program has hosted Getty Rothschild Fellows, GRI-Volkswagen Postdoctoral Fellows (with support from the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany), and GRI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellows (with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities).
2024–2025 Annual Theme and AAAHI Fellowship
Extinction
The arts have the capacity to mitigate against cultural loss by visualizing, capturing, and interpreting aspects of the fleeting, the ephemeral, and the unrecoverable. In this moment of extreme environmental decay and monumental epidemic loss, the Getty Scholars Program invites applications on the pressing topic of extinction and its bearing on the visual arts and cultural heritage. Scholars are asked to contemplate how representational practices are deployed to cope with the precarious survival of plants, animals, and humans; the ever-present specter of species-level extinction and resource exhaustion; and, at the most extreme pole, the brutality of mass atrocity. On another level, atrophy, decay, and obsolescence constitute the temporal dimensions of certain artistic practices, especially as creative approaches, technologies, media, formats, and ideals become outmoded or superseded. The finality of disappearance may also portend a certain amount of hope for rebirth, innovation, or recovery.
This year’s theme welcomes research topics that explore that which is lost, but also the urgent impulse toward preservation and permanence. Beyond loss, destruction, or mortality, the topic also seeks to explore the creative and productive possibilities that extinction may enable.
Guiding Questions
- How have recent scientific or technological advances made it possible to visualize lost sites, beings, and objects?
- What new habitations and communities have emerged or survived from the processes and effects of extinction?
- Historians, archaeologists, and cultural heritage scholars work actively to preserve and protect certain categories of visual, material, and built culture. Yet there are cases in which obsolescence is warranted, even invited. What do we choose to save and why? Who decides upon the criteria and what is the logic?
- Many forms of human expression are not meant to endure, such as performance, storytelling, music, and dance. What is the relationship between artistic forms and cultural practices that have been lost and their more durable records and traces?
- The most devastating loss is that of entire cultures and groups, sometimes targets of intentional annihilation. How can precarious forms of indigenous knowledge and fragile cultural identities that are in danger of extinction be conveyed, preserved, and represented? How might communities challenge predictions and presumptions of extinction?
African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI) Fellowship
AAAHI will support two fellows to generate new knowledge in the expanding field of African American art history. Projects that propose engagement with Getty’s growing collections of archival and primary source material related to African American art history—particularly post-World War II—are welcome. However, relevance to Getty holdings is not a project requirement. We invite applications from scholars who focus on African American art and visual culture in all time periods and media and in a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions. Applicants should indicate how their project would align with AAAHI's aim to make African American art history more visible to the public and accessible to the scholarly community worldwide.
Getty Scholars – Theme: Extinction
Heather Badamo (Consortium Scholar) is associate professor in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in East Christian and Byzantine art, Coptic art, and the global Middle Ages.
Art and Religion in the Age of Arabization: Copts in the Medieval Islamic World
(September–June)
Ananda Cohen-Aponte is associate professor in the Department of History of Art & Visual Studies at Cornell University. Her research centers on issues of racial formation, cross-cultural exchange, historicity, and coloniality in the visual and material culture of the Andes.
Presencing Absence in the Visual and Material Culture of Andean Insurgencies
(September–June)
Tomasz Grusiecki is associate professor of early modern European art and material cultures at Boise State University. His primary field of research is the visual and material culture of the early modern period, with an emphasis on Germanic and Slavonic Europe.
ECOCIDE ART: Extinction Management and the Material and Visual Cultures of the Jaktorów Forest Aurochs, 1500-1650
(January–June)
Rivi Handler-Spitz is associate professor and chair of the Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Macalester College. Her research explores Chinese literature and intellectual history, as well as comparative literature.
Savage Script: How Chinese Writing Became Barbaric
(September–June)
Sohl Lee is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University. She specializes in contemporary East Asian art and visual culture, with a focus on aesthetics of politics, vernacular modernism, Third World solidarity and decolonization, inter-specific commons, and eco-aesthetics.
Towards an Eco-centric Coastal Aesthetics: The Global Visual Cultures of Seaweeds, from Modern Visual Culture to Contemporary Art
(January–June)
Gordon Omenya is lecturer in the Department of History, Archaeology, and Political Studies at Kenyatta University, Kenya. His research centers on cultural heritage and history of East Africa, with emphasis on Kenya, in the 21st century.
Extinction and Memorial Cultures: Some Reflections on Climate Change and Cultural Heritage of the Stateless Makonde Community in Kenya
(January–June)
Thiago Sevilhano Puglieri is assistant professor in the Department of Art History and the Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research encompasses technical art history, conservation science, and Indigenous cultural heritage of the Americas, with special focus in the Brazilian Amazon region.
Engaging Science, the Humanities, and Indigenous Communities to Preserve Endangered Knowledge from the Amazon Forest
(September–June)
Gavin Steingo is professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. His research examines sound and music as fundamental features in the construction of global modernity, with specializations in African music, sound studies, and acoustic ecology.
Songful Creatures: Anti-Whaling Activism, Environmentalism, and the Avant-Garde
(September–June)
Gloria Sutton is associate professor of contemporary art history at Northeastern University. She publishes widely on the intersection of contemporary art and image technologies using an intersectional lens to examine how computational networks have informed the reception of visual art since the 1960s.
Pattern Recognition: How Computational Obsolescence Structures Cultural Memory
(January–March)
Jasmina Tumbas is associate professor in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Her research interests include contemporary art history and performance studies, especially feminist and queer art history and theory in the East European region and its diasporas.
Queer & Feminist Yugoslav Diaspora: Art of Resistance Beyond Nationhood.
(September–December)
J’Nese Williams is assistant professor in the Department of History at Wake Forest University. Her research encompasses the history of science from the 18th through 20th centuries, with a focus on botanic gardens and the British Empire.
Extinction Anxiety: Botanical Collections and the Control of Nature
(January–March)
Postdoctoral Fellows – Theme: Extinction
Alice Crowe is a PhD candidate in classics at the University of Cincinnati, expected conferral date in August 2024. She specializes in Aegean prehistory, with a particular focus on the archaeology of Late Bronze Age Crete.
Ariadne’s City Unravels: Urban Extinction on Minoan Crete
(September–June)
Aaron Katzeman is a PhD candidate in visual studies with an emphasis in global studies at the University of California, Irvine, expected conferral date in June 2024. His research analyzes contemporary art and film produced alongside resistance to military occupation, social movements for agrarian reform, and anti-colonial national liberation struggles.
Land, Art, Liberation: Visual Culture of Agrarian Movements Since the 1960s
(September–June)
Predoctoral Fellows – Theme: Extinction
Ivana Dizdar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, Canada. She specializes in 19th-century visual culture and its intersections with geopolitics, science, and environment in Europe, North America, and the Arctic.
L’Arctique à la Parisienne: The Polar North in French Visual Culture, 1839–1889
(September–June)
Alex Fialho is a PhD candidate in the Departments of the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. His scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary art, Black queer and feminist thought, and AIDS cultural studies.
Apertures onto AIDS: African American Photography and the Art History of the Storage Unit
(September–June)
Whitney Kite is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research explores medieval architecture and landscape, including afterlives of ruined monuments in the modern period.
The Ruins of Horomos: Reclaiming History after Cultural Genocide
(September–June)
Phoebe Springstubb is a PhD candidate in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the built and natural environments of the Circumpolar North in the 19th and 20th centuries.
“They builde with whale bones”: Living Building Practices, Extinct Economies, and Conflicts of Time in the 19th-Century Bering Strait
(September–June)
Getty Scholars for the African American Art History Initiative
The African American Art History Initiative’s scholars will generate new knowledge in the expanding field of African American art history. These scholars will focus on African American art and visual culture in all time periods and media and in a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions.
Christa Noel Robbins is associate professor in art history at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. She is a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century art and criticism.
Heritage and History: the paintings of William T. Williams, 1968 to present.
(September–June)
Tara Aisha Willis is lecturer in theater and performance studies at the University of Chicago. Her research areas include contemporary dance and performance studies, curatorial practices, archival studies, and Black feminist/queer of color critique.
Indescribable Moves: Improvised Experiments in Dancing Blackness
(September–June)
GRI Guest Scholars
Matthew Hunter is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Canada. His research covers the visual art and architecture of the long 18th century, with particular emphasis on their interactions with science and technology.
Anglo-American Art: Moments in the History of Insurance
(April–May)
Emiliano Melgar Tísoc is a full-time researcher titular C at the Templo Mayor Museum in Mexico City, Mexico. His research focuses on the archaeology of the Aztec Templo Mayor and archaeometric studies of lapidary objects from ancient Mexico, Guatemala, and the American Southwest.
Vanished Tenochcan Crafts: The Last Master Jewelers from Mexico-Tenochtitlan Before the Spanish Conquest
(September–December)
Connecting Art Histories Scholars
Igor Simões is a postdoctoral fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His research focuses on the intersections of Afro-Brazilian art history and the role of Brazil in the international debate about African diasporic art history.
Where are black Brazilian artists in the Afro-diasporic art history?
(September–December)
Gitanjali Pyndiah is art history researcher in the Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture at the University of Mauritius. Her research interests include natural history, visual, sonic, and language worlds of the Indian Ocean.
OūwKi the Unwinged Biped for dodo: outside taxonomy and monstrosity
(January–March)
Museum Guest Scholars
Vincent Blanchard is deputy director of Oriental antiquities at the Louvre Museum, France. His research centers on the art and culture of the Hittites and Neo-Hittites during the Bronze and Iron Ages.
From one millennium to the next: Syrian-Anatolian monumental sculpture in all its forms
(July–September)
Francien Bossema is the Migelien Gerritzen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, Netherlands. Her work is a combination of tailoring X-ray imaging techniques for scanning cultural heritage objects and using these techniques to investigate case studies.
X-Ray Dendrochronology: Novel Software for Practical Applications
(July–September)
Alisha Chipman is an independent scholar and photograph conservator. She specializes in the preservation, conservation, and technical history of photographic materials and photomechanical prints.
Photomechanical Prints: Technical History, Identification, and Care
(September–December)
Nicole Cromartie is director of learning and engagement at the Clyfford Still Museum. Her research is focused on the evaluation of early learning in museum settings, sharing curatorial authority with young children, and the benefits of museum experiences for young visitors from birth to 14 months.
Building a Community of Research and Practice on Young Children and Art Museums
(April–June)
Christiane Ernek-van der Goes is associate researcher in the Department of Decorative Arts at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany. She specializes in German and French decorative arts in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Not All That Glitters Is Gold – ‘La Mise en Couleur d’Or.’
(April–June)
David Garcia Cueto is head curator of the Department of Italian and French Paintings (until 1800) at the Prado Museum, Spain. His scholarly interests are focused on the relationship between Italy and Spain in the early modern period and the history of patronage and collecting at the court of the Hapsburgs.
Guido Reni reconsidered in light of three recent exhibitions: results, afterthoughts, and new paths
(July–September)
Danielle Jackson is an independent scholar, critic, and writer. Her work is focused on photographic archives of industry and deindustrialized places.
The Visual History of De-industrialization
(September–December)
Lia Markey is director for the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library. Her research examines cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, collecting history, cartography, and early modern prints and drawings.
Binding the Globe: Race and Empire in Luxury Atlases from the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World
(July–September)
Uwe Peltz is conservator for archaeological artworks in the Collection of Classical Antiquities, National Museums in Berlin, Germany. His expertise is in ancient bronzes, with a current focus on the history of conservation and the technology to produce them in the past, especially in Archaic Samos.
The archaic Samos: Center for ancient Mediterranean art technology transfer in bronze casting and its continued development.
(September–December)
Getty Villa Scholars – Theme: Anatolia
Murat Akar is associate professor of Anatolian and Near Eastern archaeology at Hatay Mustafa Kemal University, Turkey and director of Tell Atchana, Alalakh Excavations (Hatay, Turkey). His research areas include architecture, memory, and landscape studies with a focus on the second millennium BC.
Towards Resilient Heritage: Post-Earthquake Response at the Bronze Age Capital City of Tell Atchana, Alalakh (Hatay, Türkiye)
(September–December)
Michele Bianconi is departmental lecturer in classical philology and linguistics in the Faculty of Classics and Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, UK. His field of research, which is part of Indo-European Studies, lies at the intersection between classics, linguistics, and Near Eastern studies.
Greek and the Anatolian Languages: side-by-side across millennia
(January–March)
Deborah Carlson is professor in the Nautical Archaeology Program in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. Her areas of research include the archaeological excavation of Greek and Roman shipwrecks, as well as texts dealing with ancient Mediterranean seafaring.
Maritime Trade and Economy of Classical Ionia
(April–June)
Jan Paul Crielaard is professor of pre- and protohistorical archaeology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. He specializes in the Greek Early Iron Age and the Archaic Mediterranean, including social aspects of mobility and connectivity, the construction of identities, early Greek cult and cult places, and the material world of the Homeric epics.
Ionians, Lydians and Carians: Cultural Interactions and Cultural Transfer, ca. 900-500 BC
(January–March)
Lorenzo D’Alfonso is professor of archaeology and history of ancient Western Asia in the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and also in the Department of Humanities at the University of Pavia, Italy. His research investigates the political and social archaeology of Syria and Anatolia and cross-cultural contacts with groups and political entities in the ancient Mediterranean, ca. 1500-500 BCE.
New Phrygian inscribed ceramics from Niğde Kınık Höyük, South-Central Anatolia, and the question of adoption, use and spread of alphabetic writing in Anatolia during the Middle Iron Age
(January–March)
Erkan Dündar is associate professor in the Department of Archaeology at Akdeniz University, Turkey. His study focuses on pottery, commercial amphorae, and stamps, as well as late Classical to early Hellenistic defense and domestic architecture in ancient Lycia.
Patara and Lycia in the Early Hellenistic Period: A Place in-between in a Time of Transition
(January–March)
Alan Greaves is reader in archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, Classics, and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, UK. He concentrates on the archaeology of the Archaic Period (c. 850-500 BCE).
Oracles in Archaic Western Anatolia
(April–June)
R. Gül Gürtekin Demir is professor in the Department of Archaeology at Ege University, Turkey. Her research investigates cultural and historical relationships between Lydia and the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world during the Iron Age.
Multidirectional Look at Lydians and Ionians: Perceptions and Misperceptions in a Cultural and Political Environment
(September–December)
Jeremy LaBuff is associate professor in the History Department at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. His research examines the Indigenous communities of Anatolia during the Hellenistic Period.
Indigenous Anatolia in the Hellenistic Period
(April–June)
Naoise Mac Sweeney is professor of classical archaeology at the University of Vienna, Austria. She specializes in the history and archaeology of the Iron Age to Classical periods.
Picturing Life in Death: The Clazomenian Sarcophagi
(April–June)
Geoffrey Summers is lecturer at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes, Mauritius. His research covers the archaeology of the ancient Near East with an emphasis on the later prehistory of Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus.
Middle Iron Age Urban Concepts, Architecture, and Sculpture in Phrygia, Lydia, and the Aegean
(September–December)
Serdar Yalcin is associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Macalester College. He specializes in the art and archaeology of ancient Western Asia and eastern Mediterranean, with a special focus on the Bronze and Iron Age cultures of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia.
From Syria to Ephesos and Beyond: Exploring the Neo-Hittite Impact on the Orientalizing and Archaic Period Temples in Western Anatolia and Ionian Islands
(September–December)
Getty Conservation Institute Guest Scholars
Medhanie Andom is senior urban planner and director of the Asmara Heritage Project Office, Central Region Administration, Eritrea. His research focuses on the conservation and management of 20th-century heritage.
Developing Fiat Tagliero Conservation Management Plan Framework
(April–June)
Jigna Desai is professor in the Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India. Her field of research encompasses architecture and built heritage conservation.
'Unintentional Monuments', Addressing Challenges of Conserving Modern Heritage of South Asia
(April–June)
Cass Fino-Radin is the founder and lead conservator of Small Data Industries in New York. They specialize in time-based media art conservation, consulting, and software development.
A Field Survey of the State of Time-Based Media Conservation in the Contemporary Art World
(January–March)
Terry Little is adjunct senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria. His research focuses on cultural heritage, archaeology, and conservation, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Global Rock Art Conservation and Promotion: Challenges and Opportunities to Guide Initiatives and Institutions
(September–December)
Elena Lucchi is assistant professor at Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy. Her research focuses on enhancing energy efficiency and promoting environmental sustainability and renewable energies in architectural heritage and protected landscapes.
@MARE Project: @ Modern Architecture & Renewable Energies
(January–March)
Camilla Mileto is professor in the Department of Architectural Composition at Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. Her field of research includes architecture conservation, earthen architecture study and documentation, and traditional materials and techniques.
Earthen Architecture Conservation
(September–December)
Amanda Pagliarino is head of conservation and registration at Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Australia. Her research focuses on the modernization of cultural heritage loan protocols that recognize sustainability objectives and prioritize energy and resource efficient, environmentally conscious low-carbon emission practices.
RESPONSIVE EXCHANGE - Resetting loan protocols for equity and sustainability
(January–March)
Luiz Souza is professor in the Center of Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. His research concentrates on heritage and conservation science for preserving Brazil’s cultural heritage, emphasizing preventive conservation and material aspects of gilded wooden carvings.
GLEISE (PT-BR) - Gilded and Lacquered Surfaces in Europe (Portugal) and Brazil
(September–December)
Kararaina Te Ira is an independent scholar. Her research focuses on advancing cultural heritage conservation through the lens of Indigenous peoples’ perspectives, particularly her own Indigenous background as tāngata whenua ki Aotearoa (New Zealand Māori).
A Practitioner's Experience: Advancing Cultural Heritage Conservation through the Eyes of Indigenous Communities
(April–June)
Fernando Vegas López-Manzanares is professor in the Department of Architectural Composition at Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. His area of study encompasses architectural conservation, tile vaulting, and vernacular architecture.
Tile Vaulting Conservation
(September–December)
Past African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI) Scholars
2023/2024
julia elizabeth neal is assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her study focuses on modern and contemporary art, African American art, performance, conceptual art, critical historiography, transnationalism and internationalism.
Benjamin Patterson: Theory and Praxis
James Smalls is professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His specialty is in African American art, European art, and Black Diasporic visual culture.
Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism
2022/2023
Bernida Webb-Binder is assistant professor of art history and curatorial studies in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia. Her research focuses on African American art, Pacific Islands art, and Black Pacific Art.
Generative Blackness in African American and Pacific Art
2021/2022
Cherise Smith is chair of the African & African Diaspora Studies department and professor of African & African Diaspora Studies and art history at the University of Texas, Austin. She specializes in American art after 1945, especially as it intersects with the politics of identity, race, and gender within the histories of photography, performance, and contemporary art.
Healing Old Wounds: Affect, Appropriation, and Trauma in Contemporary African American Art
Tobias Wofford is assistant professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. His research focuses on the crossroads of globalization and identity in the art of the African Diaspora and on concepts of diversity and multiculturalism in American art.
Black California: African American Contributions to the Visual Culture of the American West Before 1950