Katia Zavistovski recently received her Masters degree from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, with a focus on contemporary art. During her time at Williams, Katia was the Clark Curatorial Intern at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), where she curated the exhibition InVisible: Art at the Edge of Perception. Prior to attending Williams she worked for five years at SITE Santa Fe, a non-profit contemporary art exhibition space in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has also held internship positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Christie’s Auction House, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Katia spent the past summer working as the Samuel H. Kress Graduate Teaching Fellow for Smith College’s Summer Institute in Art Museum Studies.  

Before joining Rice University, Umit Fırat Acıkgoz worked as a teaching and research assistant at Bogazici University Department of History in Istanbul, where he had obtained his BA, also completing the course load of the PhD program of the same department by spring 2010. He received his MA from Middle East Technical University Graduate Program in Architectural History in Ankara.  Acıkgoz’s interests involve colonial encounters in urban context, representation of the Ottoman cities in the accounts of the western travelers,  architectural and urban history of the post-Ottoman Middle East particularly Syria under the French mandate.

Carolyn Van Wingerden studies Renaissance and Baroque art and is especially interested in crosscurrents between the art of Northern Europe and that of Italy in the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries as well as in prints and print culture.  Before focusing on the history of art, she studied the literature of early modern England and continues to think about the connections between literature and the visual arts in early modern culture.  She completed her M.A. in the history of art at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) at New York University (NYU).

Melissa Venator focuses on twentieth-century European art, especially the art of interwar and postwar Germany. Before entering Rice, she received a Masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and a Bachelors degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, both in Art History. Venator is also an experienced arts administrator, working most recently for the San Francisco Symphony, with Masters degrees in Arts Administration and Business Administration from Southern Methodist University.