Throughout human history, artists have invariably embraced technological innovations—from the casting of ancient bronzes to the invention of the tin paint tube to the printing of three-dimensional objects—and harnessed the new possibilities afforded by them. Art and technology are deeply intertwined; after all, the terms “technology” and “technique” are both derived from the Greek word techne, meaning “art” or “craft.” Technological developments spur artistic experimentation by extending the horizon of what is possible and by encouraging artists to consider traditional mediums in new ways and to explore new mediums altogether. The theme of “Art & Technology” encompasses questions on manufacture and craft, process and invention, materiality, and immateriality, and the digital and the virtual.
The Getty Scholars Program supports researchers in advancing knowledge of the arts and humanities and producing cutting-edge scholarship that contributes to the understanding and preservation of cultural heritage. While in residence, scholars have the opportunity to spend significant time at one of the world’s premier art history collections while contributing to an international community committed to intellectual exploration and exchange. Scholars may be in residence at the Getty Center or Getty Villa.
“We want to give scholars the space and means to truly be creative and adventurous. At Getty it’s not just the fantastic setting that appeals to scholars, it is also the opportunity to take advantage of the exceptional resources we provide them, including access to our collections and inclusion in a vibrant intellectual community of visiting scholars, as well as the researchers, historians, conservators, scientists, and curators who work here,” says Alexa Sekyra, head of the Scholars Program at the GRI.
Sekyra continues, “As our influence is global, so is our pool of applicants, with scholars coming from around the world…Art history is evolving to encompass a more global perspective and it is our mission to continue to broaden our outreach to bring in international scholars representing diverse worldviews.”
Scholars and Fellows in residence under the auspices of the Getty Scholars Program join a lively cohort of researchers and professionals who are hosted by other programs across the Getty campuses. In addition to the applications for the annual theme, there are open calls for applications to the African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI), the Getty Scholars Program at the Villa, and the Getty Conservation Institute. Additionally, certain categories, such as Guest Scholars, the Artists-in-Residence, the President's International Council Scholar, Connecting Art Histories Scholars, and Museum Scholars, are nominated by invitation.
Getty Scholars 2023/2024—Theme: Art & Technology
Meredith Cohen (Consortium Scholar) is associate professor in the department of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on medieval art and architecture, cultural heritage and conservation theory, and digital technologies for research and pedagogy.
Imagining the Lady Chapel: Gothic Architecture and the Poetics of Digital Reconstruction *
(September–June)
Patrick Crowley is associate curator of European art in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. He specializes in European art, particularly the art and archaeology of the Roman world.
Solid Pictures: Photosculpture and the Reproduction of Reality
(September–December)
Eva Díaz is associate professor in the history of art and design department at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. Her research centers on modern and contemporary art, as well as new media.
A Riot of Perfume: Biopolitical Technologies and Non-Visual Art
(September–March)
Roger Fayet is director of the Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, Zurich, Switzerland. His field of research is modernist painting.
Why leave it visible? How works by Ferdinand Hodler ostentatiously display his use of technical devices and what it could mean
(September–December)
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi is associate professor in the art history department at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Her areas of research include African art history and digital art history.
“Mapping Senufo”: Art, Technology, and a Reimagined Scholarly Monograph
(September–June)
Jason Hill is associate professor of art history at the University of Delaware, Newark. His research focuses on the history of photography, art of the United States, and visual culture.
The Static Image: Police Media and Documentary Photography in 20th-Century America
(January–June)
Sabine Klein is professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. She specializes in pyrometallurgy, smelting, ore geology, and elemental and isotopic geochemistry.
Appropriation of cosmic iron in art and technology (CosmArT)
(September–December)
Yuliya Sorokina is associate professor at the Zhurgenov Kazakh National Academy of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan. Her research centers on the art history of post-Soviet countries.
Wrong Usage: Domestic Tools as Art Technology in Post-Soviet Countries
(September–June)
Saburo Sugiyama is research professor in the school of human evolution and social change at Arizona State University, Tempe. His field of research is pre-Columbian urbanism.
Embodying Mesoamerican Cosmic Cities: New Visualization Technologies at Teotihuacan & Monte Alban
(September–June)
Kristine Tanton is assistant professor in the department of art history and film studies at the Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada. Her areas of research include the history of medieval art and architecture and digital art history.
Imagining the Lady Chapel: Gothic Architecture and the Poetics of Digital Reconstruction *
(September–June)
Alex Walthall is associate professor of Greek and Roman archaeology in the department of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on Greek art and classical archaeology.
Hellenistic Technology in the Wild
(January–June)
- = Joint scholar project
Postdoctoral Fellows—Theme: Art & Technology
Nina Horisaki-Christens is a 2021-23 Mary Griggs Burke Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, New York. Her research focuses on the intersection of art, media, urbanism, translation, and social engagement in Japan, Asia, and the Asian diaspora.
Participatory Technologies and the Techno-orientalist Gaze: How the video camera and the photocopier reshaped ideas of public space in 1970s Tokyo and why the world misunderstood
(September–June)
Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió is assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego. He specializes in architectural history.
Decolonial Technics: Midcentury Modern Architecture on the Agua Caliente Reservation
(September–June)
Predoctoral Fellows—Theme: Art & Technology
Magdalena Grüner is a PhD candidate in art history at the Universität Hamburg, Germany. Her research focuses on the intersections of modern art, science and technology, epistemic images, history of natural history, ocean humanities, and feminist art history.
The Science/Fictions of the Bermuda Oceanographic Expeditions
(September–June)
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy is a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She specializes in modern and contemporary art, technology, and gender.
Drawing Machines: Vera Molnar’s Abstract Computer Graphics, 1968-1989
(September–June)
Nina Wexelblatt is a PhD candidate in the history, theory and criticism of architecture and art program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research centers on the history of 20th-century art and technology.
Telepresence: Transnational Satellite Art and the “Open Empire”
(September–June)
Getty Scholars for the AAAHI
Getty’s AAAHI aims to address an incomplete version of American art history by increasing the Research Institute’s African American-related collections, research, exhibitions, and projects. Our special collections include archival and primary source material related to African American art history—particularly post-World War II, modern, and contemporary—and we are acquiring and processing major collections or collaborating on acquisitions from a range of artists and institutions. As part of the larger scholar year cohort, AAAHI scholars will have opportunities to present their research and receive feedback from an interdisciplinary group of peers.
julia elizabeth neal is assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her study focuses on modern and contemporary art, African American art, performance, conceptual art, critical historiography, transnationalism, and internationalism.
Benjamin Patterson: Theory and Praxis
(September–June)
James Smalls is professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His specialty is in African American art, European art, and Black Diasporic visual culture.
Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism
(September–June)
GRI Guest Scholars
Maggie Cao is David G. Frey Associate Professor in the art and art history department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in 18th- and 19th-century American art and the intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics.
Time Warps and Time Keeping: American Art and the Ecological Archive
(January–March)
Carolina Caycedo (Artist in Residence) (1978) is a Colombian, London-born, multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, videos, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and nonhuman entities. Caycedo is currently a nominee for the Artes Mundi 10 prize in Wales. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Serpent River Book Vol 2.
(September–June)
María Olvido Moreno Guzmán is an independent scholar. Her field of expertise is in pre-Hispanic Mexico, colonial Mexico, indigenous religion, and feather art from Ancient Mexico.
Catalog of Feathers Used by the Ancient Amantecas
(September–December)
Yulia Mylnikova is an independent scholar. She specializes in Chinese history, art history, culture, and society.
The Tanguts: Searching for a Lost Civilization on the Silk Road.
(September–June)
President’s International Council Scholar
Deborah Swallow was the Märit Rausing Director at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. Her area of research is in Indian art and anthropology.
The future of museums: debate and practice in the Indian context
(April–June)
Connecting Art Histories Scholars
Thanavi Chotpradit is lecturer in the department of art history at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. She specializes in modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia.
Amorphous Translation: Three Case Studies of Contemporary Art Initiatives from Southeast Asia
(April–June)
Pagona Papadopoulou is assistant professor in the school of history and archaeology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests include Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European numismatics in the medieval period and the economic history of Byzantium.
Representations of the Prophet Daniel in Late Byzantine Art
(April–June)
Museum Guest Scholars
Thea Burns is an independent scholar and adjunct associate professor in the art conservation program, department of art history and art conservation at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. Her study focuses on works on paper and parchment, with special interest in medieval and Renaissance drawing and writing materials.
Carta azzurra: a study of early modern European blue paper
(January–March)
Jacob L Dahl is professor of Assyriology in the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern studies and fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University. He specializes in late 3rd millennium BC administrative history and the invention and early spread of writing in the ancient Near East.
Late 3rd and early 2nd millennium BC seals from Ancient Mesopotamia
(July–September)
Ann Hoenigswald is senior conservator emerita of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Her research focuses on late 19th-century and early modern works.
Degas's Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli: Process and Decision Making for a Reworked Painting
(September–December)
Dorothy Kosinski is director emerita of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. She specializes in 19th-century symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, 20th-century sculpture, and contemporary art.
- Douglas Cooper at the Chateau de Castille: A cultural life in post-war France
- Purpose is the only thing: Towards a model of authentic impact in the 21st century museum
(January–March)
Megan McNamee is lecturer, history of art at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research interests encompass questions of form, style, transmedial effects, and the interplay of intellectual and material culture in medieval Europe.
Premodern Conceptions of Time, Folding, and Tablet Weaving
(January–March)
Vadim Parfenov is professor in the department of photonics at the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University. His research centers on optics and lasers, conservation, and cultural heritage.
The application of the Thunder Compact Laser in the cleaning of ancient marble surfaces: Research and experimentation to develop safe conservation protocols
(April–June)
Georg Plattner is director of the collection of Greek and Roman antiquities in the Ephesus Museum of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. He specializes in the architecture of Ephesus and classical archaeology.
The scaenae frons of the Ephesian Theatre
(April–June)
Anthony Sigel is an independent conservator and scholar. His study encompasses conservation of objects and sculpture, and particularly in European terracotta sculpture.
The technical study of two Michelangelo terracotta models in the Casa Buonarotti, “Due Lottatori,” and “Female Torso”
(September–December)
Jennifer Tonkovich is the Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator in the department of drawings and prints at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Her work is focused on French drawings.
Treating 19th-century French Drawings as Old Masters: New Narratives for the Morgan’s Online Catalogue
(July–September)
Getty Villa Scholars—Theme: Anatolia
The Classical World in Context: Anatolia
The 2023–2024 Getty Villa Scholars Program will examine relations between the Greek cities of western Asia Minor and Anatolian civilizations from the 2nd millennium to the Roman Imperial period.
Mary Bachvarova is the Lindsay and Corinne Stewart Chair in the Humanities and professor of classical studies at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. Her field of research includes the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age of Greece and Anatolia, the Hittites, poetry, prayer, and religion.
Greek Poetry and the Near East
(September–December)
Alain Duplouy is associate professor of history and archaeology of archaic Greece at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France. His study focuses on Greek art, archaic sculpture, behaviors, and lifestyles.
”Ex Oriente luxus?” The politics of habrosunē. A behavioral approach to archaic Asia Minor.
(April–June)
Elspeth Dusinberre is professor of distinction in the department of classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She specializes in Anatolian archaeology, particularly in the region of Phrygia.
Early Phrygian Gordion and the Classical World ca. 800 BCE
(January–March)
Amanda Herring is associate professor of art history at Loyola Marymount University, California. Her research centers on Hellenistic Greek architecture and sculpture, as well as modern reception of the classical past.
Anatolizing Greek Heroes in Hellenistic and Roman Anatolia
(September–December)
Hazar Kaba is associate professor in the department of archaeology at Sinop University, Turkey. His work is focused on Greek domestic architecture and household organizations.
Late Fourth-Century BC Houses from Sinope as Mediums to Understand the Ionian Culture Within a Wider Geographic Context
(January–March)
Hilmar Klinkott is professor of ancient history at the Institut für Klassische Altertumskunde, Abteilung Alte Geschichte at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany. His research interests include the history of the Achaemenid empire, classical and Hellenistic Greece, Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid empire, and the Roman Republic and early Principate.
Anatolian Local Identities under Achaemenid Rule
(April–June)
Sarah Madole Lewis is associate professor and deputy chair of art history at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her study focuses on Roman funerary art, social experience, and regional contexts, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean.
Sarcophagi as Markers of Identity in their Local Contexts in Roman Anatolia
(January–March)
Kathryn Morgan is assistant professor of classical studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Her field of research is Anatolian archaeology.
Beyond Midas: Towards a Postcolonial Archaeology of Phrygia
(September–December)
Felipe Rojas is associate professor of archaeology at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. He specializes in Anatolian archaeology, archaeology of the senses, and performance studies.
Kinesthetic Histories in Ancient Anatolia
(April–June)
Andreas Schachner is professor at the German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul, Turkey. His research centers on Near Eastern and Anatolian archaeology.
Modular Architecture in the Bronze and Iron Ages of Anatolia: the Cases of Boğazköy/Hattusha - Göllüdağ - Kerkenes Dağı
(January–March)
Willemijn Waal is university lecturer in Hittite studies at the Universiteit Leiden and director of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO). Her work is focused on the Late Bronze Age of Anatolia and the Aegean, Hittitology, and classics.
Oral or Aural? Ancient Greek epic from an Anatolian perspective
(September—December)
Getty Conservation Institute Guest Scholars 2023/2024
The program, now in its 24th year, provides opportunities for established scholars or individuals who have attained distinction in their field to pursue research on topics that bring new knowledge and fresh perspectives to the field of conservation.
Recipients are in residence at the Conservation Institute for either a three-month or six-month term, in which they pursue their own projects free from work-related obligations, make use of research collections at the Getty Center and Getty Villa, and participate with other Getty scholars, fellows, and interns in the intellectual life of Getty.
The scholars will have access to research collections at the Getty Center and Getty Villa
Yael Alef is an architectural conservator and scientific manager of the National Cultural Heritage Inventory Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority. Her research focuses on how digital inventories can best represent information about the cultural significance of archaeological heritage.
Cultural Significance Assessment of Archaeological Sites in the Digital Age: From Text to Spatial Networks of Meanings
(September–December)
Marie Dubost is a conservator in private practice in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, France. Her research focuses on the tools and techniques of gilded wooden surfaces in decorative arts.
Recutting in Western Europe
(September–December)
Stephen Kelley is an architect and structural engineer in Oak Park, Illinois. His research focuses on the analysis and retrofit of heritage structures subjected to seismic forces.
Cracking the Code: Earthquakes and Conservation of Built Heritage
(September–December)
Giorgio Buccellati is professor emeritus in the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures and the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on conservation in Urkesh, one of the largest early cities in Syro-Mesopotamia.
Locally Based Conservation and Community Involvement at Ancient Urkesh
(January–March)
Cornelius Holtorf is professor of archaeology and UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. His research focuses on how the climate crisis is transforming cultural heritage.
Heritage in Transformation
(January–March)
David Saunders is a conservation scientist and independent scholar in Hertfordshire, England. His research focuses on the impact of new technology and practice on sustainability in museum lighting.
Sustainability and Museum Lighting
(January–March)
Bertrand Lavédrine is professor in the Centre de recherche sur la conservation at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, France. His research focuses on developing a methodology for describing photographic processes, and sustainability in photographs conservation.
Taxonomy for Photographic Images and Sustainability in Photograph Preservation
(April–June)
Barbara Lubelli is associate professor in the department of architectural engineering and technology at Technische Universiteit Delft, Netherlands. Her research focuses on salt crystallization damage to building materials and the mitigation of its effects.
Development of Accelerated Laboratory Test for the Assessment of the Durability of Plasters and Renders with Respect to Salt Crystallization
(April–June)
Aga Wielocha is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Institute Materiality in Art and Culture at Hochschule der Künste Bern, Switzerland. Her research focuses on museum procedures for collecting and preserving process-based contemporary art.
Having, Holding, Keeping, Sharing: New Art and New Ways of Institutional Collecting and Preserving
(April–June)