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."

Ellen Joo received her bachelor's degree in art history from Chapman University in 2019. She joined the Chinese and Korean Art Department as an intern in 2019 and was hired as a research assistant in 2021. Joo plans to research East Asian ink paintings with a focus on Korean ink paintings of the Japanese colonial period. Through a global modernist approach, she aims to analyze the ambivalence East Asian artists experienced towards the importation of Western goods and ideas in 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.