Getty Announces 2025/2026 Scholars

Celebrating its 40th anniversary, the GRI Getty Scholars Program proudly announces the recipients of the 2025/2026 fellowship cycle, including scholars and arts professionals from around the world who will be in residence exploring the theme of Repair. This timely topic invites critical engagement with a range of art and cultural forms across disciplines, geographies, and historical periods.

Since its inception in 1985, the Getty Scholars Program has supported approximately 1,300 scholars from more than fifty countries, providing a collaborative space for inquiry and exchange at the Getty Center and Getty Villa in Los Angeles.

“As we celebrate four decades of supporting pioneering scholarship, this year’s theme of repair feels especially urgent and universally resonant,” said Alexa Sekyra, head of the Scholars Program at the Getty Research Institute. “In a time marked by cultural reckoning and environmental fragility, we are proud to support scholars whose work not only deepens our understanding of the past but also envisions new ways forward for preservation, justice, and renewal through the arts.” The 2025–2026 GRI theme seeks to explore the many layers of the concept of repair —whether in healing damaged objects, commemorating societal fractures, or addressing historic wrongs through artistic and institutional means. While in residence, scholars will question not only what constitutes damage or ruin but also the implications and ethics of repair, offering a unique lens through which to consider preservation, memory, and reconciliation.

In addition to the GRI's program oriented around the theme of Repair, scholars and professionals will be hosted by the Getty Scholars Program at the Villa under the theme of Religious Experience in Antiquity and the Getty Conservation Institute. Certain categories, such as Guest Scholars, Connecting Art Histories Scholars, Museum Scholars, and the President's Scholar, were nominated by invitation. Throughout their residency, Getty Scholars engage with a vibrant intellectual community and the Getty’s world-class resources, including vast library and special collections. The program fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and nurtures scholarship that contributes to the broader public understanding of cultural heritage.

Getty Scholars – Theme: Repair

Lisa Gail Collins is professor of art and the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair at Vassar College. Committed to the interdisciplinary humanities, her research and writing focus on contemporary American art with an emphasis on Black lives; intimacy and everyday life; and art and artmaking as social practice and community building.
'Where Tenderness is Possible': Art, Creative Practice, and Community
(September–December)

Hannah De Corte is a postdoctoral researcher at FRS-FNRS, Université de Namur, Belgium. De Corte’s approach to painting is informed by the fundamental role of grounds and supports in the perception and interpretation of images.
Tortured Pictures: Re-Reading Cubist Paintings in Light of Excessive Early Treatments
(January–June)

Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann is associate professor and director of the Christiansborg Archaeological Heritage Project (CAHP), Ghana. Her critical heritage work centers on the history and legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and internal slavery, descendant epistemologies, repair, reparations and restorative justice in Ghana.
Slave Traders in the Family: The Archaeology of the Slave Trader in the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast
(September–June)

Ignacio G. Galán is assistant professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research explores architectural histories of residence and belonging in 20th-century Europe and the United States, engaging concerns with nationalism, migration, and disability.
Independent Living, Care, and Labor: Disability Histories of Housing and Domesticity Repair
(September–December)

Andil Gosine is professor of environmental arts and justice at York University, Ontario, Canada. His research considers issues of representation and its burdens, through examination of contemporary Caribbean visual arts.
Coolie Créole: Art For and Against 'Us'
(January–June)

Yannis Hamilakis is Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and professor of modern Greek studies at Brown University. His research focuses on material memory and sensoriality, the socio-politics of the past, coloniality and decoloniality, and the material culture of the Aegean from prehistory to the present.
The Acropolis Otherwise: Undoing Monumental Racecraft as Repair
(September–December)

Christopher Heuer is professor of art and art history and teaches in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies as well as in environmental humanities at the University of Rochester. His research engages the theories, ecologies, materialisms, and politics of Europe from AD 1400 to the present, with a particular interest in early modern myths of North, poverty, and waste.
Robert Smithson and Waste
(September–June)

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of comparative literature and gender studies at Columbia University. She writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective, a process she has termed “post memory.”
Epiphanies of Repair: Memory Art and Practice
(January–March)

Suzanne Hudson (Consortium Scholar) is professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California. Her research spans the 19th through the 21st centuries with special emphasis on the history, theory, and conventions of painting within art schools and alternative pedagogical institutions, which include spaces of care work and medical and psychological services.
Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process
(September–June)

Lynn Meskell is Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, Richard D. Green Professor of Anthropology, and professor in historic preservation at the University of Pennsylvania, curator in the Middle East and Asia sections at the Penn Museum and serves as AD White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She has conducted an institutional ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage, tracing the politics of governance and implementation and the resulting implications for multilateral diplomacy, international conservation, and rise of heritage conflict and securitization.
Ruin and Repair: A Heritage of War from UNESCO to NATO
(January–June)

Mercy Romero is associate professor in criminology, law, and society at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include the built environment, carceral landscapes, poetics, poverty, and the archives and documents of Black/Latinx art and social movements.
Farewell: Black Nursing, Hospital Planning, and the Reparative Arts
(September–June)

Predoctoral Fellows – Theme: Repair

Max Bowens is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. His research centers on the visual culture of biometrics in the United States from the Civil War era to the present.
Storing the Self: Art, Data, and Repatriation
(September—June)

Elise Chagas is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Her research focuses on relationships between aesthetics, politics, and regimes of value in modern and contemporary art of the Americas.
Local Color and Resilient Form: Apu-Rimak’s Theory of Modern Andean Art
(September–June)

Maur Dessauvage is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. His research interests include aesthetics and ideological representation in architecture; historicism and philosophies of history; the intersection of 19th-century theories of style with the natural sciences, anthropology, religion, and legal theory; and the history of art history.
Rebuilding an Imperial Body: The Historicist Restoration of Speyer Cathedral, 1854-1858
(September–June)

Jinyi Liu is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research examines the art and material culture of late imperial China and early modern global trade, with a focus on embodied craft knowledge and the agency of materials and objects.
Growing the New from the Old: The System of Reuse, Rework, and Repair of Marble in the Qing Dynasty Court (1644-1911)
(September–June)

Benjamin Price is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His research centers on 19th and early 20th-century art, anarchism, and the history of science.
Destroy the Present and Repair the Future: Anarchism, Art, and Science in Late-Nineteenth Century France
(September–June)

Joe Riley is a PhD candidate in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, and the Program for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Through research spanning the studio, laboratory, and archives, his scholarship revisits histories of the US environmental art movement with a critical and oceanic lens.
Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward a Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970
(September–June)

Emilela Thomas-Adams is a PhD candidate at Ohio State University. Her research explores the creative and spiritual potential of repaired and recycled medieval objects, especially those made of parchment and fabric.
Silk and Skin: Repair and Recycling in Late Medieval Objects
(September–June)

GRI Guest Scholars

Gudrun Bühl (Ernst von Siemens Foundation) is research curator at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Germany. Her research focuses on the implications of historical and contemporary repair practices on ivory objects to explore the philosophical, cultural, and ethical dimensions of man-made, and other than man-made alterations of late antique and Byzantine works of ivory.
No Easy Fix for Fragile Histories: Ruptures and Repair in the Study of Byzantine Ivory Works
(September–December)

Huey Copeland is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interrogates African/Diasporic, American, and European art and theory from the late 18th century to the present from a Black feminist perspective.
Thinking the Unthought: From Continental Philosophy to Black Radical Study
(January–June)

President’s Scholar

Sandra Jackson-Dumont is an independent scholar in Los Angeles, California. Her work critically examines the role of cultural spaces as catalysts for democracy and social cohesion, convening interdisciplinary leaders across sectors to develop forward-thinking strategies that redefine institutional impact.
The Power of Place: Cultural Spaces as Catalysts for Social Cohesion, Democracy, Well-Being
(September–June)

Connecting Art Histories Scholars

Alebachew Birru is assistant professor of archaeology and heritage studies at Debre Berhan University, Ethiopia. His research focuses on the areas of archaeology, visual culture, megalithic culture, and heritage studies in the Horn of Africa.
Exploring the Practice of Reconsecrating Ruined Medieval Churches in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia
(January–June)

Cheikh Sene is associate researcher in Groupe Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Histoire Africaine (GIRHA), in the Department of History at Université du Quebec à Montréal, Canada. His research centers on material cultures, cross-cultural exchange, slave trade, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism in West Africa.
Objects as money and consumer goods in Senegambia at the time of the slave trade (14th-19th centuries)
(January–June)

Museum Guest Scholars

Heba Abd el Gawad is senior curator of anthropology at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, United Kingdom. Her research centers on developing community-led museum practices confronting the colonial legacies of the extraction and erasure of Indigenous cultural belongings and identities.
Reclaiming Egypt: Centering Egyptian Communities in the Interpretation and Display of Egypt's Dispersed Heritage
(January–March)

William Crow is director of art galleries and professor of practice in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Design at Lehigh University. His research focuses on the public benefits of art, museums and cultural institutions.
Sketching in the Art Museum: A Tool for Thinking and Well-Being
(January–March)

Margaret Gaida will start as assistant professor at Occidental College in fall 2025. Her research focuses on textual, visual, and material cultures related to astronomy, astrology, optics and magic in the medieval Mediterranean, and deals especially with cross-cultural knowledge exchange between the Islamic world and Europe.
Celestial Patterns: Visual Displays of Astrological Information in Manuscript and Print Culture
(April–June)

Florian Knothe is director of the university museum and art gallery and director of the museum studies program at the University of Hong Kong, China. His research focuses on early modern European and Ming and Qing dynasty Chinese art and cross-cultural influences in royal and imperial courts and workshop production.
La Compagnie des Indes au Service du Roi: Royal Requests of Chinese China
(April–June)

Pascal Labreuche is an independent scholar in Paris, France. He focuses his research on manufacturers and suppliers of materials for painters and draftsmen active in Paris and France from the 18th century to the 1960s, with a particular emphasis on the supports (canvases, panels, stretchers, boards, papers, frames, etc.) and the catalogue of suppliers’ marks, labels, stencils and stamps.
“Looking Beyond the Face of the Painting: A Valuable Resource for Art Historians, Conservators and Provenance Specialists.” Guide Labreuche: The Guide to Suppliers of Artists' Materials in France, 18th-20th Centuries.
(September–December)

Jacob W. Lewis is an independent scholar in Catonsville, Maryland. His research is on art, photography, and politics in 19th-century Europe, as well as its relevance to the global present.
Charles Nègre and the Studio Environment; Photography Is History
(July–September)

Jane Munro is an independent scholar in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her object-based research and expertise are in the materials and making of art and the conditions and circumstances of creation.
Sights (mainly) unseen: documenting the places, spaces and act of drawing in Europe 1600-1900
(January–March)

Sarah Staniforth is an independent scholar in Cheltenham, United Kingdom. She will be completing a book in the Routledge Science for Conservators series on Preventive Conservation in Practice.
Preventive Conservation in Practice
(July–September)

Dean Sully is associate professor in the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, United Kingdom. His research explores critical heritage practice to generate post-humanist responses for heritage conservation in creating more-than-human futures of the Anthropocene.
“Ayn Ghazal in a Future World”, the Conservation Object as a Matter of Concern
(September–December)

Getty Villa Scholars – Theme: Religious Experience in Antiquity

Manuel Alvarez-Marti-Aguilar is senior lecturer in ancient history within the Department of Historical Sciences at the University of Málaga, Spain. His research focuses on the cultural history of the coastal communities of ancient Iberia, approached through the lens of environmental history and the Blue Humanities.
Religious Experiences at the Edge of the World: Tides, Storms, Tsunamis, and the Shaping of Apotropaic Rituals among Communities of the Gulf of Cadiz in Antiquity
(April–June)

Nadia Ben-Marzouk is lecturer at Loyola Marymount University. Her research explores the social contexts of innovation and craft production in the Bronze Age East Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the identities, embodied knowledge, and social networks of producers.
Crafting the Religious Experiences of Glyptic Producers in the Making of an East Mediterranean Exchange System (ca. 2000-1500 BCE)
(September–December)

Anna Bertelli is assistant professor in the Institute of Archaeological Studies and Faculty of History at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Bertelli’s research focuses on Greek archaeology, ancient and modern cult practices, and the processes of city formation, particularly in Crete and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Sacred Crossroads: Investigating Early Iron Age Interconnections between Crete and the Eastern Mediterranean through the Sanctuaries of Gortyn
(April–June)

Megan J. Daniels is assistant professor of ancient Greek material culture in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research traces the emergence of shared religious ideologies of rulership across western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean through myth and iconography, focusing on their expressions and transformations in Iron Age Greece (ca. 1100-500 BCE).
Intercultural Iconographies of the Mediterranean Iron Age
(September–December)

Andrea De Giorgi is professor at Florida State University. He specializes in Roman urbanism and visual culture from the origins to late antiquity, with emphasis on the Eastern Mediterranean and the Italian peninsula.
Oracles, Synagogues, and Saints at Daphne (Harbiye, Turkey)
(January–March)

Lucinda Dirven is professor of ancient religions in the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Radboud Universiteit, Netherlands. Her research centers on the religious history of the Roman and Parthian Near East.
Where East Meets West: Experiencing Mithras in Dura-Europos
(September–December)

Ingo Gildenhard is professor of classics and the classical tradition at the University of Cambridge, England. His research centers on Latin literature and Roman culture (especially in cross-cultural perspective), as well as the vibrant “afterlife” of ancient Greece and Rome in subsequent centuries.
The Justice of Religions: Variations and Convergence in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East
(April–June)

Ine Jacobs is Stavros Niarchos Foundation Associate Professor of Byzantine Archaeology and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford, England. Her research interests include the experience and perception of the built environment in Roman and Byzantine times, long histories of the display and reception of sites, statuary and artifacts, and material religion.
Worshipping the Mother Goddess in Late Antique Aphrodisias. An investigation into multiple religious consciousness.
(January–March)

Barbara Kowalzig is associate professor of classics and history at New York University. Her research centers on the religion, society, and anthropology of ancient Greece in the transcultural context of the Mediterranean, particularly in conjunction with economic history and theory.
Gods around the Pond: Religion, Society, and the Sea in the Early Mediterranean Economy
(January–March)

Troels Kristensen is associate professor of classical art and archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on Greek and Roman visual culture, ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage, late antique archaeology, and contemporary uses of classical heritage.
Pilgrimage and the Gendering of Religious Experience at the Argive Heraion
(April–June)

Sabine Neumann is senior lecturer at the University of Marburg, Germany. Her research focuses on the material culture of ancient religion, cross-cultural exchanges between Greece and the Mediterranean, religious imaginaries, spaces and agency.
Imaginary Gods: The Cults of the Greco-Egyptian Deities in Athens
(September–December)

Katie Rask is associate professor at Ohio State University. She is an archaeologist of religion, with a research emphasis on ritual, personal experience, and materiality in Greece and Etruria.
Etruscan Religious ‘Books’ in Context: The Archaeology of Mediterranean Religious Texts
(April–June)

Christine M. Thomas is professor in the Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an archaeologist who specializes in the material dimensions of religious practice in the Roman eastern Mediterranean, focusing on the vibrancy and agency of objects, and the effect of built environments on human patterns of habitual movement and affective experience.
The World at the Fingertips: Exploring Domestic Religious Practice on the Edges of Empire at the Terrace Houses in Roman Ephesus
(September–December)

Kenneth Yu is assistant professor of classics at the University of Toronto, Canada. Yu's research interests focus on ancient Greek religion, conceptions and representations of wonder in classical antiquity, and the history of classical scholarship.
Manufacturing the Divine: Technê and the Phenomenology of Wonder in Hellenistic and Imperial Greece
(January–March)

Getty Conservation Institute Guest Scholars

Maddalena Achenza is associate professor in the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Ambientale e Architettura at the Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy. Her research focuses on the conservation, restoration, and adaptive reuse of traditional and monumental earthen buildings, and on the contemporary use of earth-based materials.
The Ninmakh Temple in Babylon. A methodological approach for the conservation and the repair of the reconstructed monuments in Babylon.
(September–December)

Ravina Aggarwal is an independent scholar in New York. Her research focuses on issues of cultural and natural heritage, environmental movements, nonprofit management, education, gender, social inclusion, and peace-building in South Asia, especially the Himalayan region of India.
Living Museums, Ghost Cultures: Heritage Conservation and Changing Land Use in the Ladakh Himalayas
(January–March)

Eleni Aggelakopoulou is head of the Conservation Department in the Acropolis Restoration Service at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Greece. Her research focuses on archaeometry and conservation materials science with a particular focus on the study of the architectural polychromy of the Acropolis monuments.
Parthenon’s west entablature in color – new scientific data versus 19th century literature
(April–June)

Cecilia Benedetti is an independent researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research centers on issues of heritage practices, material culture, and Indigeneity in northern Argentina.
Exploring Indigenous Conservation: Chané Masks and Materiality
(January–March)

Davison Chiwara is lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. His research focuses on toxic pesticide contaminants in museum collections and the safety protocols for their handling, use, display, and storage in museums.
Institutionalization of Safety Protocols in the Handling and Use of Contaminated Collections in Zimbabwe’s Museums: Lessons from Approaches Adopted by Museums in Los Angeles, USA
(September–December)

Delia Hagen is an independent scholar in Missoula, Montana. She specializes in the spatial history of settler colonialism and marginalized groups in the 19th- and 20th-century North American West, with a focus on historical erasure, race, place, and multi-scalar, multi-modal deep-mapping.
Mapping Indigenous Montana: Reclaiming Urban Space
(January–March)

Antonio Iaccarino Idelson is an independent scholar in Rome, Italy. His research focuses on testing canvas paintings’ lining methods to allow reproducibility and a higher degree of predictability of the final results.
Aiming at Reproducibility in Canvas Painting Lining Techniques
(April–June)

Ajay Khare is professor and dean of research at the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, India. His research interests are temple architecture of India and intangible cultural heritage of sacred cities, temple towns of Tamil Nādu in south India and urban heritage conservation as historic urban landscape.
Developing an Inventory and Cultural Heritage Mapping of Temple Towns in Tamil Nādu, India: Case Study - Kanchipuram
(April–June)

Shatha Safi is director of RIWAQ, Centre for Architectural Conservation, Palestinian Territory. Her research focuses on cultural landscape and community involvement.
MANATEER: Preserving the Resilient Spirit of Palestinian Agriculture
(September–December)