ASU-LACMA Master's Fellowship in Art History

Velma Kee Craig joined the Heard Museum as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in 2017 and was hired as assistant curator in 2020. She is a textile artist and teaching artist, and she has produced short films and written poetry. She is a graduate of Arizona State University with a BA in English literature and a minor in American Indian studies. She has taught Diné weaving workshops with organizations such as the Heard Museum, Phoenix Indian Center, Sacred Youth Foundation and local school districts’ Native American programs. Her weavings have been exhibited as part of the exhibitions: "Celebrating Gifts from Spiderwoman’s Grandchildren," "WOVEN: The Art of Contemporary Native Weaving," "Connective Tissue," "WEAVE: construct. code. connect" and "Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Weaving." She has won awards for her short films "Interview with Einstein" and "in this manner, I am."

Hope Flores earned her BA in art history from California State University, Long Beach, in 2021. She has worked in the arts since 2015 and has previously held positions at the Museum of Latin American Art, Vincent Price Art Museum, LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, and Self Help Graphics & Art. Flores is an alum of the Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship program and was notably the first community college student to earn a Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship at LACMA in 2016–18. She returned to LACMA in late 2021 as a curatorial assistant in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department. In her current role, she manages her department’s active acquisition program and has contributed to the recent exhibitions Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You, I Mean Me, I Mean You. (2022); City of Cinema: Paris, 1850–1907 (2022); and Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising (2022). Flores intends to use her positionality as an ASU-LACMA Fellow to historicize the resurgence of experimental analog photography in contemporary Latinx and (post-)Chicanx art.

Becca Folkes-Lallo received her bachelor’s degree in urban studies and media studies with a concentration in film from Rhodes College in 2022. She joined the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2022 as the school programs coordinator. In her role, Folkes-Lallo engages students from across the Memphis area in gallery exploration and artmaking. Deeply influenced by the ways students find themselves in artwork, Folkes-Lallo plans to explore the way Black female artists from the American South use their work as a means of storytelling and community building.

Julia Han received her BA in art history from the University of California, Riverside, and a master’s degree in library and information science from University of California, Los Angeles. Han joined LACMA in 2011 as the Balch Art Research Library's stacks manager and currently works as librarian across the Balch Art Research Library and the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. At ASU, Han plans to examine issues at the intersection of museums, globalization, and information ethics, with a focus on provenance, repatriation, and indigenous decolonization. She is also interested in exploring the unfolding narratives and ethical issues around North Korean art.

Emily Le received her Bachelor of Arts in art history and English, with a minor in archaeology, in May 2021 from the University of Southern California (USC). Le first joined LACMA in 2019 as an Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow, first in the Japanese Art Department and then in the European Painting and Sculpture Department. She is now working in LACMA’s Development Department as the annual giving assistant. As an ASU-LACMA fellow, Le plans to further explore her research interests in Asian American, Asian Diasporic and Southeast Asian art histories, especially in relation to ideas of memory, counter-memory and post-memory.

Claudia López grew up on the borderlands known as Ciudad Juárez-El Paso. Her Indigenous identity is rooted in northern Mexico where her ancestors are from. López migrated to Phoenix as a young adult and obtained a BFA in photography from Arizona State University in 2018. In her current position as the bilingual communications specialist at PhxArt, López leads the museum’s bilingual initiative, helping the institution connect with the Spanish-speaking community. Her curatorial endeavors are centered in people and their stories, while her community-building efforts focus on indigenizing spaces, supporting transborder voices, and unlearning Eurocentric and patriarchal narratives. As an ASU-LACMA Fellow, López intends to further her research of matrilineal preservation of ancestral knowledge, seeking to build a framework founded on Indigenous ways of thinking, and one that acknowledges BIPOC identities outside of the binary.

Jackeline Lopez received her Bachelor of Arts in anthropology with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She joined LACMA as an Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow in 2019 and was hired as a curatorial administrator in the Art of the Ancient Americas department in 2021. Lopez is a first-generation Latina from South Central Los Angeles who draws on her anthropological training to understand emic and etic power dynamics in museum spaces. Her goals as a scholar in the ASU-LACMA Fellowship are to investigate implicit cultural practices that expect and even prompt emerging BIPOC museum professionals to specialize in the very same curatorial areas that tokenize them and to help center Indigenous ontologies and narratives in Mesoamerican studies.

Jayne Manuel earned her BA in art history, theory and criticism with honors from the University of California San Diego in 2015. Manuel joined LACMA’s registration department in September 2015 and currently serves as the registration administrator for the highly active outgoing loans program. Through an interdisciplinary art history-ethnic studies-transnational feminist approach, Manuel seeks to uplift Pilipino/a/x artists and stories of the diaspora into the institutional canon. She intends to focus on 1980s Philippine art collectives and contemporary Pilipino/a/x artists based in the United States, studying their depictions of intergenerational trauma and understanding of collective memory transmission.

Roshii Montaño is a queer Diné scholar currently working in Phoenix, AZ. She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Art History with departmental honors in 2020. Soon after graduating, she joined the Heard Museum as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow and was hired as a curatorial assistant in 2022. She has assisted in many exhibitions at the Heard Museum and is independently co-curating an exhibition at Idyllwild Arts “Looking at Us: Examining Institutional Critique.” Roshii’s research interests include Indigenous queer performance, contemporary Indigenous art, decolonial theory, and Navajo textile politics concerning gender, labor, and economy.

Stephanie Rouinfar received her BFA in art history in 2015 from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She joined LACMA in August 2015 as a social media intern in the communications department. In March 2016 she joined the Art of the Middle East department as the curatorial administrator. She has assisted with six exhibitions, including the recent exhibition “In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art.” As a fellow in the ASU-LACMA program, Rouinfar plans to further study contemporary art of the Middle East, focusing on works concerning gender and feminism.

Mariama Salia is from Seattle and received a BA in history and cinema studies from the University of Washington in 2014. After working in Seattle’s art scene, she moved to Los Angeles in 2018 to find more diverse creative spaces that allowed for expansion. She began working for the Balch Research Library in 2019 as an acquisitions assistant, purchasing and borrowing books for upcoming exhibitions, including special research projects. Her Ghanaian-Romanian background informs her interest in making art representative and accessible, and she plans to develop an interactive project aimed at engaging with and representing other queer artists of color. Salia intends to utilize the extensive resources within the library and the museum to trace and reassess historical boundaries facing marginalized artists who bridge the cultural divide.

Emily Valdes graduated from the University of Miami with a BA in art history in 2015. Since then, she has held a variety of positions at the Wolfsonian FIU, Margulies Collection at the Warehouse and Lowe Art Museum. Today, she works collaboratively with curators, artists and preparators as assistant registrar at Miami’s flagship art museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). At PAMM, Valdes plays an active role in the execution of a robust exhibition schedule, as well as day-to-day collections management efforts. As a first-generation Cuban American, Valdes is particularly interested in female, Latin artists who have failed to receive equal recognition to their male contemporaries, or female, Latin artists whose practices are deeply rooted in intersectional feminism. Though it is still nascent in conception, she is eager to produce a successful body of research significant to the advancement of Latina representation in museums and the acknowledgement of their unique contributions to the art historical canon.

Ninabah graduated from ASU in 2016 with a BA in digital culture (music). Since then, she has worked on exhibitions at the Heard Museum and at Idyllwild Arts, including Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Textiles (2019) and Looking at Us: Examining Institutional Critique (2022). In 2022, Winton joined the curatorial department at the ASU Art Museum as an assistant curator. Her research interests lie in contemporary craft and design, contemporary North American Indigenous art, sound and audio art, textiles and fibers, and material and craft economies. Winton is Diné (Navajo), and is based in downtown Phoenix.

Deliasofia Zacarias is the Snap Research Fellow based in the Director’s Office for the LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives, an initiative that explores monuments, history, and representation in public space using augmented reality. In addition to the various special projects in the Director’s Office, Zacarias directly supports the collaboration among the curatorial team, artists and technologists to realize the augmented reality lenses as part of Monumental Perspectives. Zacarias joined the museum in August 2019 as a LACMA Emerging Arts Professionals (LEAP) Fellow—part of the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative supported by the Walton Family Foundation and Ford Foundation. Zacarias also serves on the board of the Arts Administrators of Color Network.

At Arizona State University, Zacarias intends to research the intersection of contemporary art, feminist theory and landscape architecture and make use of LACMA’s and ASU’s rich collection. She holds a BA in studio art and business administration from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she was the recipient of the Mach Fellowship and received an Excellence in Art Award.