Doctoral
Catalina Cherñavvsky Sequeira, PhD Student
Catalina is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Art History at UT Austin. Her research is centered around experimental film, video, and performance in Argentina and Brazil during the latter half of the 20th century. She focuses specifically on transregional artistic networks, systems of circulation, and phenomenological shifts that occurred under authoritarianism. Her dissertation follows two women-led artist groups working with compact film and video formats to explore how they reclaimed and reconceptualized space through the filmic screen.
Recent awards: Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship in Prints and Drawings, Blanton Museum of Art (2022-2023), John F. Newman Endowed Presidential Fellowship in Art History, University of Texas at Austin (2022)
Pilar Dirickson Garrett, PhD student
Maysa Martins, PhD student
Recent awards: Honorable Mention, Peter C. Marzio Award for Outstanding Research in 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021); Mellon Curatorial Fellowship in Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art (2020-2021)
Nicole Smythe-Johnson, PhD candidate
Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator from Kingston, Jamaica. She has written for Flash Art, Terremoto, Jamaica Journal, Small Axe, and several other regional and international publications. Most recently, she was Assistant Curator on “Neither Day Nor Night” (2017-2019), an exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the American Folk Art Museum in New York City
Lucy Quezada Yáñez, PhD candidate
Recent awards: Fulbright for Study in the U.S. (2019-2024); Mellon Curatorial Fellowship in Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art (2021-2022); Brazil Initiation Scholarship, Brazilian Studies Association (2020)
Chasitie Brown is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History and the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) at UT Austin. Her research interests include contemporary Latin American and Caribbean art centered around race, gender, and diaspora. Her dissertation examines the three-part exhibition series Queloides (1997-2012) that focused on questions of racial identity in post-soviet Cuba. Staged in Cuba and the United States with affiliate shows in Spain, she argues that the series served as a transnational network between the series participants (artists, curators, and art critics) to articulate new imaginings of Blackness that privileged the sociological and affective embodiments of race.
Recent Awards: Harington Dissertation Fellowship (2024-2025); Twelve-Month Itleson Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (2023-2024); Goizueta Graduate Fellow at the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami (2023-2024); Middlebury College Language Grant (2023).
Masters
Mia Villarreal, MA student
