Alumni and Careers

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

I worked as a paralegal at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for three years before beginning law school at Fordham in 2023. After graduating this year, I’ll join Weil Gotshal in New York as a litigation associate.

Why art history?

I love art!

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

Any class with Professor Stephen Perkinson is a joy. And I will never forget Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art with Professor Peggy Wang. The course challenged my assumptions about art and how we assign cultural value more broadly.

What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your field?

Spend more time at the Bowdoin Art Museum.

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

The summer after graduating from Bowdoin, I worked as a curatorial intern at the Brooklyn Museum in the American Art department. In the fall of 2019, I joined the Library Company of Philadelphia as a curatorial fellow in their graphic arts department. This fellowship gave me the opportunity to co-curate Imperfect History: Curating the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin’s Public Library, alongside my colleagues Erika Piola and Sarah Weatherwax. I was involved in the curatorial process from an early stage, which allowed me to gain extensive experience conducting research, selecting objects, and writing labels.

In 2021, I began a PhD program at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where I am working on a dissertation about photography and migration in the western Indian Ocean.

Why art history?

When I arrived at Bowdoin, I didn’t have a clear sense of what I wanted to study. I only knew that I enjoyed anything that involved extensive reading and writing. I took Introduction to Art History, co-taught by Professors Dana Byrd, Stephen Perkinson, and Peggy Wang, and was challenged in ways I hadn’t experienced before. Through that process, I discovered that I really enjoyed crafting arguments through visual analysis.

During my senior year, I wrote an honors thesis on African American art under the supervision of Professor Byrd. Completing the thesis was an intense but rewarding experience that taught me how to conduct original research. It also showed me how I could contribute new knowledge to the discipline.

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

Since graduation, I have worked at several art museums and continued my studies in art history. Immediately after Bowdoin, I held a one-year post-bac position at the Clark Art Institute, working with the director to learn about the administrative and operational functions of art museums. Following my year at the Clark, I entered the graduate program in art history at Williams College, where I continued to explore academic interests initially developed at Bowdoin, including early modern studies and technical art history. During my time at Williams, I worked closely with the Williams College Museum of Art, the department of art history, and the department of studio art, focusing on object-based teaching for undergraduates and interdisciplinary research.

After graduating from Williams, I began working with The Metropolitan Museum of Art's fellowship program at to gain a closer look at how the fellows study the collection and apply object-based research in professional and academic settings. I am currently the associate for administration for Egyptian art at The Met, where I am part of the collections management team for Egyptian art and manage research-related requests, gallery projects, and programs. I serve as the main department liaison for the Temple of Dendur gallery and oversee department activity in the space, especially for infrastructure updates and large-scale events, including the Costume Institute Benefit (The Met Gala).

Why art history?

I started out at Bowdoin fully convinced I would be majoring in biochemistry and spent most of my first year focused on STEM courses. In the spring semester of my first year, I decided to take my first art history course with Associate Professor of Art Emerita Susan Wegner on Art of the Ancient Americas. I later took her seminar on Spanish Baroque painting in my sophomore year and was completely hooked on the discipline. It made me nervous, as I had already invested so much time in one direction and worried about experiences or opportunities I might have missed. In reality, I made the right decision at the right time for me. Looking back, I appreciated the flexibility and dynamism that art history naturally allows, though the decision to switch degrees took time and many conversations with faculty, staff, and friends.

I still wanted to incorporate my chemistry background into my art historical work, and through a joint fellowship with the art history department and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, I joined a student team along with Stephen Pastoriza ’19 and Benjamin Wu ’18, working on the Molinari Collection of portrait medals at the museum with Co-Director Anne Collins Goodyear. Our work spanned the rest of my time at Bowdoin, and I coordinated metallurgical analysis of some of the works, developed a catalogue raisonné for one of the medalists, and co-curated the exhibition A Handheld History: Five Centuries of Medals from the Molinari Collection at Bowdoin College.

Ultimately, following the interdisciplinary path of the art history and visual arts degree didn’t feel like a conscious decision; it happened naturally, and my work in both disciplines flourished. At one point, I even submitted master copies of paintings for my art history final papers, and once left a still-wet copy of Winslow Homer’s Weaning the Calf at Dana Byrd’s door, which still makes me laugh at how the hallway smelled of paint and procrastination.

What advice would you give to current students or recent graduates interested in your field?

I was a first-generation college student and entered Bowdoin as a QuestBridge match. Naturally, you approach each experience with a level of imposter syndrome and anxiety over doing the “right” or “wrong” things. Lean into the relationships you are building at Bowdoin. It was through the encouragement of faculty, staff, and friends that I am where I am today. Many things they told me have stuck with me, and one I want to pass on is that “90 percent of being in this field is showing up.”

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

A few months after graduating, I started working at the Brooklyn Museum, where I still currently work. I had done an internship at the museum while I was in college, and then on breaks and sometimes on weekends, I would go back to support programs on a one-time, freelance basis. After I graduated, I started working on a part-time, temporary basis for the programs department. Later, I was hired full-time. I have been working at the Brooklyn Museum and using the combined power of both of my majors at Bowdoin and a lot of my extracurriculars. I was the co-president of the art society, and so I would plan events, symposiums, and an annual art show at Ladd House. I was also really interested in bringing speakers in the arts to campus and fostering a small but lively artistic extracurricular scene. I very much use those skills today in programming for the Brooklyn Museum. My team oversees several dozen programs a year, which serve tens of thousands of local and international visitors. I also get to work with Enrique Mendia ’20, who completed a fellowship at the museum a few weeks ago! Our flagship public program at the museum is called First Saturdays, which has been ongoing since 1998 and brings thousands to the museum for a free monthly evening of music, arts, and culture that activates nearly every space in the museum’s 200-year-old building. I feel lucky to get to work with creative people—including artists, dancers, musicians, and poets—in my work.

Why art history?

I love working with artists. It's such a privilege to be able to see their visions and help execute them fundamentally. Especially at Bowdoin, I was really drawn to what art could represent and how you could use art as a soft power, in a sense. I really enjoyed studying both modern and contemporary art because it really reflected the politics behind whichever time period it belonged to.

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

Art for the People with Peggy Wang.

What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?

After graduating from Bowdoin, I worked for several years in the commercial art world before beginning my master's degree in industrial design at Pratt Institute, where I am studying now. I first joined Sotheby's graduate training program, where I rotated through different departments including museum services, African and oceanic art, and watches and clocks. After finishing the program, I earned a full-time position at Sotheby's as associate cataloger in the twentieth-century design department, where I researched and wrote catalog notes for historically significant design objects to be presented at auction. Upon deciding to leave Sotheby's, I worked at Artsy as a gallery relations liaison, managing the platform's relationships with around 140 gallery partners across North America. For most of the first year of the pandemic, I was at Maison Gerard, a design gallery in downtown Manhattan.

After the lockdown began and the 2020 George Floyd protests occurred, however, required social distancing provided me some solitary time to reflect and reconsider my career goals. I realized that I wanted to switch gears and apply all of the art history knowledge and art world experience that I had accumulated both to reengage my creative side, which I felt I had come to neglect while working in the business-oriented fields of the art world, and to more directly produce positive social change through my work. Studying industrial design now gives me the opportunity to explore my dual interests in social justice and design for public spaces, and I hope to conceptualize inclusive design at the scale of physical and social infrastructure.

Why art history?

At its purest, art history was the ideal academic pursuit for me because it allowed me to combine my love of beautiful things with my curiosity for examining societal patterns and structures. I'm not saying that all art is or should necessarily be beautiful, but for me, art history provided a lens through which I could observe different historical and cultural perspectives from a human-centered position. Since I am a visual learner, art history also helped me process and absorb information in a different, more accessible way. Bowdoin's art history department provided me with some of my most valuable academic lessons and experiences, many of which still inform my worldviews to this day, and I will always be grateful for that.

To anyone thinking about working in galleries or auction houses, my advice is to be aware that, at the end of the day, these are businesses—capitalist enterprises—and that the work you are given may well reflect the financial interests of those institutions more than the academic interests that you may have developed while studying art history in a college setting.

Are there any classes, professors, or experiences that had a lasting impact on you?

Historicizing the Present: Topics in Recent Chinese Art with Peggy Wang, and Hieronymous Bosch with Stephen Perkinson.