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.

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.

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.

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.