Grace Reff, second year MA student, has received a scholarship to attend the American Craft Council Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, this October. In addition to her studies, she is the part-time assistant in the Artist Studios Program at the Museum of Arts and Design, where she works with the museum’s artist residency and fellowship programs. Alumni Lara Schilling (MA 2016) and Andrew Gardner (MA 2015), along with current doctoral candidate Mei-Ling Israel, have also been awarded scholarships to attend the conference.
Ella Howard (MA 1998), who received her PhD from Boston University, is an associate professor of history at Wentworth Institute in Boston.
Brian Gallagher (MA 1999, MPhil 2012), curator of decorative arts at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, recently published British Ceramics 1675-1825: The Mint Museum. The book features some 225 works from the Mint’s permanent collection. In January, he opened a major reinstallation of the collection called Portals to the Past: British Ceramics 1675-1825.
Judith Gura (MA 1999) is on the faculty at the New York School of Interior Design. Her most recent book, published in October, was Interior Landmarks: Treasures of New York. She is currently working on a book about Postmodernism to be published by Thames and Hudson.
Barbara Forsyth (MA 2003) is collections manager at San Diego’s Mingei International Museum.
Leigh Wishner (MA 2004) lives in View Park, Los Angeles, which has just been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. She is a curatorial assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Sarah Archer (MA 2006), an active member of BGC’s Philadelphia Alumni Chapter, has a new book coming out this fall. Entitled Mid-Century Christmas: Holiday Fads, Fancies, and Fun from 1945 to 1970, it will be published by Countryman Press.
Katie Hall Burlison (MA 2006), curator at the Louisiana State Museum, visited New York City in January. While in town, she met with fellow alums Monica Obniski (MA 2006) (left) and Elizabeth Essner (MA 2006) (right). Monica is curator of decorative arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum, while Elizabeth is both an independent researcher and an appraiser of modern and contemporary design.
Paula Eleazar (MA 2007) is responsible for design development studies and interior design programs related to the new campus project in Houston, Texas, of global resource company, BHP Billiton. Within her purview are the art and company history program, the graphics and signage package, workplace programming and analysis, and new systems and applications integration. The building is set to open to employees in 2017.
Hi’ilei Hobart (MA 2009) recently completed her PhD in Food Studies at New York University. Her dissertation was entitled “Tropical Necessities: Ice, Territory, and Taste in Settler Colonial Hawaiʻi.” She has received an ACLS two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Indigenous Studies at Northwestern University, where she will teach two classes per year and be housed in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.
Emily Luski Terenyi (MA 2011) has been living in Vienna, Austria, for almost six years. For several years, she taught English there through the Fulbright program and for the past three years has been working in a contemporary art gallery. She and her husband welcomed their first child, Theodore, on May 30, 2016.
Sarah Rogers Morris (MA, 2013), associate director of the Mies van der Rohe Society in Chicago, was recently interviewed by Knoll about Mies’ legacy on the occasion of his 130th birthday. Read the interview here.
Emma Scully (MA 2014) is a furniture account manager at the online marketplace, 1stdibs, where she is responsible for the success of almost 200 dealers specializing in all areas of decorative arts and twentieth-century design. She is also in the appraisal studies program at New York University.
Summer Olsen (MA 2016) has returned to California and, as of June 24, is assistant registrar at LA Packing, Crating, and Transport, an art handling and storage company that deals with mostly contemporary art for museums, galleries, artist studios, and private collectors.