The alumni of the undergraduate and graduate programs of the Department of Art History have gone on to a wide variety of careers nationally and internationally, ranging from tenured academics to museum curators, gallery directors, gallerists, art experts in leading auction houses, and to a variety of other occupations that may or may not have anything directly to do with art. Whatever they do, our alumni find that education in art and art history enhances understanding, interpretation, and appreciation of cultures past and present and enriches our engagement with the world.
We encourage all our alumni to stay connected with us. Please provide us with your preferred contact information and email any news and updates to share with fellow alumni and us at art.alumni@utoronto.ca. We highly recommend you also provide your preferred contact information with the University of Toronto’s Alumni Association.
Please visit our News page for the latest news on the achievements, awards, and successes of the Department’s alumni.
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Kate Addleman-Frankel
- PhD 2019
- Thesis: Dividing Lines: Early Photogravure, Reproduction, and the History of Photography
- Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography at Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University
Kate Addleman-Frankel joined the Johnson Museum of Art in October 2017. Since her arrival Kate has been collaborating with faculty, librarians, and curators to develop thematic teaching sets of images to help instructors integrate visual materials more deeply into their curricula. The first teaching set, built around an introduction to photography, will be followed by additional sets in Asian studies, landscape and the environment, inequality and discrimination, and labor and work—four themes chosen to engage a wide range of faculty partners. While fostering more extensive and coordinated use of the photography collections, these sets will also be used in campus-wide First-Year Writing Seminars to encourage visual literacy and to show students how to use visual objects in their writing and research. Kate completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Jordan Bear.
Nina Amstutz
- PhD 2013
- Thesis: Caspar David Friedrich and the Science of Landscape
- Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Oregon
- 2013–16 (2015/16 academic year declined) Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art
Nina Amstutz joined the faculty in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at UO in 2015. Her current book project, "Caspar David Friedrich: Nature and the Self," is under contract with Yale University Press and considers how methods and ideas in the life sciences informed the relationship between nature and the human subject in the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s late landscapes. She has published aritcles related to this project in Art History (2014) and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (2016). Nina completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Mark Cheetham.
Oliver Botar
- PhD 1998
- Professor, School of Art, University of Manitoba
Oliver Botar is a Professor of Art History in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. He completed his doctoral work under the direction of Professor Robert Welsh, in the then Department of Fine Art at U of T, submitting his thesis “Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism: Biocentrism, László Moholy-Nagy’s ‘New Vision’ and Ernő Kállai’s Bioromantik” in 1998. It was a major contribution to the study of German and Hungarian intellectual history. He is a leading scholar of the Bauhaus and Hungarian modernism, who brings to bear his deep knowledge of urban planning and history of science in his writing on historical and contemporary art and design. His many publications in English, German, and Hungarian, include the major catalogues, Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts (2014) and A Bauhausler in Canada: Andor Weininger in the 50s (2009).
Anna Buechler
- PhD
- Wissenschaftliche Assistentin, Postdoc, Universität Zürich
Heather Diack
- PhD 2010
- Thesis: The Benefit of the Doubt: Regarding the Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art, 1966–1973
- Assistant Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Art History, University of Miami (2012–2023)
- Associate Professor of History of Art, Photography and Visual Culture, The School of Image Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University
Heather Diack is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Miami where she teaches modern and contemporary art, critical theory, visual culture, and the history of photography. Within these fields, Diack specializes in the history and theory of conceptual art, global contemporary art practices, and American studies with an emphasis on art from the late 1960s to the present. Diack’s research approaches art history through an interdisciplinary lens, grappling with significant shifts in twentieth- and twenty-first century art, while drawing connections to relevant cultural and socio-political contexts. Heather completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Louis Kaplan.
Alexander Harper
- PhD 2014
- Thesis: Patronage in the re-Christianized Landscape of Angevin Apulia: the Rebuilding of Luceria Sarracenorum into Civitas Sanctae Mariae
- 2018–21 Law Student, Harvard Law School
- 2015–18 Link-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Princeton University; Lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Council of the Humanities
- 2013–15 Consortium for Faculty Diversity Pre-/Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Department of Italian and Italian Studies, Bryn Mawr College
Alexandra Hoare
- PhD 2010
- Thesis: Salvator Rosa as "Amico vero": The Role of Friendship in the Making of a Free Artist
- Lecturer, University of Bristol
From 2013, Alex Hoare has been Lecturer in Early Modern Art at the University of Bristol, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Renaissance and Baroque topics. Her current research projects include two publications (Harvey Miller Publishers, 2018) on the painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615–73). She is also preparing a new project on the phenomenon of autonomy among early modern artists. After graduating from Toronto, she held a three-year post-doctoral fellowship as Research Associate at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, where she worked with visiting scholars and the Dean on a series of research projects and publications, including the two first volumes of a new critical edition and translation of Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina Pittrice. Alex completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Philip Sohm.
Olenka Horbatsch
- PhD 2017
- Thesis: Impressions of Innovation: Early Netherlandish Printmaking, 1520-1540
- Curator, Dutch and Flemish collection, The British Museum
Olenka Horbatsch is curator of the Dutch and Flemish collection of Prints and Drawings before 1880 at the British Museum. Olenka completed her dissertation on printmaking in the Netherlands c. 1520-1540 under the supervision of Professor E. M. Kavaler and defended in January 2017. Olenka specializes in Netherlandish graphic arts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, with a particular interest in materials and techniques and their significance to the function and reception of prints and drawings.
At the British Museum, she is in charge of one of the most comprehensive collections of Netherlandish graphic arts, including important holdings by Rembrandt and Rubens. She has curated an exhibition of Rembrandt’s prints and drawings (2019) and is preparing an exhibition of printmaking in Prague under Rudolph II (2021). She is currently undertaking a research and catalogue project on early Netherlandish drawings in the Museum’s collection. Her work has appeared in the Rijksmuseum Bulletin and in edited volumes published by Brepols, Routledge and British Museum Press. In addition to research and exhibitions, Olenka teaches post-graduate courses with objects in the study room and lectures to a broad range of audiences in order to share the collection as widely as possible..
Lise Hosein
- MA 2001
- Producer, CBC Arts
Lise Hosein produces regional video content for CBC Arts. Before CBC Arts, she was an on-air arts reporter at JazzFM and an interview producer at George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight. Lise occasionally teaches at OCADU and Sheridan College.
Katie Jakobiec
- PhD 2014
- Thesis: Grain, Stone, and Red Velvet: The Material Assemblages of a City on the Vistula River in Poland, c. 1555–c. 1655
- 2018–19 Berenson Fellow, I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian and Renaissance Studies
- 2016–18 Scott Opler Research Fellow in Architectural History, Worcester College, University of Oxford
Katie Jakobiec is an art and architectural historian with research interests that lie broadly in interdisciplinary approaches to the built environment of the early modern period. Currently she is preparing for publication her first book, The Architecture of Commodities, which explores the buildings and sites that facilitated the exchange of goods in the Baltic Sea region. Before her fellowship at I Tatti, Katie was the Scott Opler Junior Research Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College, University of Oxford. She has taught art and architectural history at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of Toronto. Katie completed her MA (2006) and her PhD under the supervision of Professor Christy Anderson.
Adi Louria-Hayon
- PhD 2013
- Thesis: Folding Spaces and Porous Bodies: Sound and Sight in Bruce Nauman's Oeuvre
- Associate Professor, Art History Department, Tel Aviv University
Carolina Mangone
- PhD 2012
- Thesis: Bernini as the Seicento Michelangelo: Imitation and Identity in Art, Architecture and Biography
- Associate Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
Carolina Mangone specializes in southern Renaissance and Baroque art. She is currently completing a book manuscript that examines how Gianlorenzo Bernini, the “Michelangelo of his age,” perpetuated his predecessor’s achievement in an epoch as deeply ambivalent about Michelangelo’s artistic exemplarity as it was wholly obsessed with his prestige and celebrity. Before joining the Princeton faculty, Carolina was an Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University (2013–15). She teaches courses on 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century southern European figural arts, architecture and material culture with a focus on concepts and practices of imitation and originality; medium specificity and inter-mediality; the arts of self-inscription (portraiture, biography, autobiography); the phenomenon of non-finish; the posthumous lives of early modern artists in image and text; and the practices and temporality of early Christian antiquarianism. Caroline completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Evonne Levy.
John T. McQuillen
- PhD 2012
- Thesis: In Manuscript and Print: The Fifteenth-Century Library of Scheyern Abbey
- Associate Curator, Morgan Library & Museum, New York
John T. McQuillen is the Assistant Curator of Printed Books & Bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. John completed his dissertation, In Manuscript and Print: The Fifteenth-Century Library of Scheyern Abbey, Bavaria, under the supervision of Professor Adam S. Cohen and defended in September 2012. John specializes in medieval manuscripts and the European invention of printing, focusing on the physical evidence in books that elucidate their production, history, use, and the implications that their medium had on their readers.
At the Morgan Library, John is in charge of the premier collection of incunabula (books printed before 1501) in North America, including three copies of the Gutenberg Bible. Straddling both the research library and art museum worlds, John teaches classes with rare book materials, assists scholars in their own research pursuits, researches and acquires items for the collection, as well as creates public exhibitions drawn from the rich holdings of the Morgan Library & Museum, across the departments of Printed Books & Bindings, Ancient Seals & Tablets, Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts, Literary & Historical Manuscripts, and Prints & Drawings. Through his work at the Morgan, he has been featured on rare book blogs and in television interviews on the PBS NewsHour and Charlie Rose programs.
Sarah Richardson
- PhD 2016
- Thesis: Painted Books for Plaster Walls: Visual Words in the Fourteenth-Century Tibetan Murals at the Buddhist Temple of Shalu
- Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream (Continuing), Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga
After her thesis study on Tibetan Buddhist mural paintings, Sarah is teaching students in history of religion courses at UTM (using a lot of images and objects!). She is excited to show students how objects can be another kind of “text” through which to understand both history and religion. She is working on a book about the roles of inscriptions in Tibetan architectural contexts, and an exhibition on the potential for personal transformation through sight in Buddhist contexts. Sarah completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Jennifer Purtle.
Michaela Rife
- PhD 2020
- Thesis: Public Art, Private Land: Settler Colonialism and Environment in New Deal Murals on the Great Plains
- Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows, History of Art, University of Michigan (2020-2022)
- Assistant Professor of Art, SUNY Plattsburgh
Michaela Rife is an ecocritical historian of American art. Her research is particularly concerned with the intersections of visual culture and environmental history in the American West. More broadly, she is interested in the possibilities of an environmental focus for the wider field of art history. She is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation, which considers the role of public art in Dust Bowl communities as a way to understand how art can both contend with environmental disaster and how it can shore up (or resist) settler colonialism. She is also in the early stages of a new project on the place of art in making and remaking American mining communities, drawn from earlier research on artists’ promotion and criticism of resource extraction. Her research has been funded by a range of institutions, including the Getty Research Institute, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Michaela completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Mark Cheetham.
Michelangelo Sabatino
- PhD 2005
- Thesis: Italian Modern Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition: The Aesthetics of Morality
- 2014-2017 Professor & Director PhD Program in Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology
- 2017-2019 Interim Dean, The Rowe Family College of Architecture Endowed Chair, Illinois Institute of Technology
- 2019-Present Professor & Director PhD Program in Architecture, Inaugural John Vinci Distinguished Research Fellow, Illinois Institute of Technology
Michelangelo Sabatino studies intersections between culture, technology, and design in the built environment. After earning his doctorate at the University of Toronto, he pursued a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of History of Art + Architecture at Harvard University. Sabatino taught the history of architecture at Yale University and the University of Houston before his appointment to IIT in 2014. He has been a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, The MacDowell Colony, the Georgia O’Keefe Museum Research Center, and the Wolfsonian at Florida International University. He lectures widely in Europe and the Americas, participates in juries, and serves on a number of editorial boards. Sabatino has served as Visiting Professor at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura (IUAV), Universita degli Studi della Campania, and TU Delft.
His recent and forthcoming books include Canada: Modern Architectures in History (with Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, 2016), Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony (with Ben Nicholson, 2019), Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone (with Barrie Scardino Bradley and Stephen Fox, 2020), Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–1975 (with Susan Benjamin, 2020), Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller (with Napoleone Ferrari, 2021), and The Global Turn: Six Journeys of Modern Architecture and the City, 1945-1989 (with Tom Avermaete, 2021).
His monograph Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2011) was recognized with multiple awards, including the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, and the American Association of Italian Studies’ Best Book Award, 20th and 21st Centuries.
Devon Smither
- PhD 2016
- Thesis: Bodies of Anxiety: The Female Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1913–1945
- Associate Professor, Art History/Museum Studies, University of Lethbridge
- Associate Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lethbridge
Devon Smither joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge as an Assistant Professor in 2016, where she teaches Canadian art history, Museum Studies, and Indigenous art history. Current research projects include an examination of the self-portraits of Canadian artist Pegi Nicol MacLeod and a longer-term research project on the women artists whose work formed the foundation for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Devon holds a BA from the University of Alberta and an MA from the University of British Columbia and completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Mark Cheetham.
Sarah Stanners
- PhD 2009
- Thesis: Going British and Being Modern in the Visual Art Systems of Canada, 1906–1976
- Director, Curatorial & Collections, The McMichael Canadian Art Collection
- Director, Jack Bush Catalogue Raisonné
Karine Tsoumis
- PhD 2013
- Thesis: Bernardino Licinio: Portraiture, Kinship and Community in Renaissance Venice
- Senior Curator, The Gardiner Museum
Karine Tsoumis is a specialist of the Italian Renaissance with a focus on sixteenth-century Venetian art, maiolica and the material culture of the domestic space. She received her Masters’ Degree in Art History from McGill University (2005) and completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Philip Sohm. Karie joined the Gardiner Museum in 2012 as the curator of the historical collection.