Nicole Elizabeth Cook (Ph.D., 2016) began a new role as senior program manager at the Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA) at the MFA Boston in October 2023. Cook had previously worked for six years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art managing academic partnerships and programs, and enrichment and professional development activities for students and fellows.

She is excited to be building on these prior experiences at the CNA, as well as being involved with projects related to her research speciality of early modern Dutch and Flemish Art, such as collections research and exhibition development.

Cook is especially interested in continuing to expand the CNA's educational reach and potential public audiences to contribute to its mission as an active center for advancing innovative approaches to the study and appreciation of Netherlandish art. She is also in the process of completing a manuscript that traces the rise of nocturnal imagery in the Netherlands during the 17th century to explore the artistic and social contexts of night, and she is delighted to be working on this project within a vibrant community of experts in the field.​

Tiarna Doherty (Ph.D., 2024) has been named deputy director for Curatorial, Exhibitions + Collections of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (FIU). Doherty comes to FIU directly from the Smithsonian Institute's Office of Planning Design and Construction.“We are thrilled to welcome Tiarna Doherty," said director Casey Steadman. “She brings a unique combination of attributes—including institutional leadership experience, art history scholarship and deep expertise in collections care and management—that will enable her to make vital contributions to The Wolfsonian's continuing program of world-class exhibitions and its commitment to growing access and engagement with its collections for all audiences."

The Wolfsonian–FIU is a museum, library and research center devoted to art and design, with a collection of more than 200,000 items from the period 1850-1950. The collection includes fine arts, decorative arts, graphic design, industrial design, architectural drawings, rare publications and ephemera. Doherty officially joined The Wolfsonian in December 2023, and among the key initiatives she will helm are the development of a long-term exhibition program as well as two major collections storage reorganization projects supported by grants from federal agencies. She will also play a key role in The Wolfsonian's building expansion project, presently in the initial design phase.

Doherty previously served as chief of conservation at the Lunder Conservation Center, Smithsonian American Art Museusm and on program and award committees for the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the Washington D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and ArtTable​.

Margarita Karasoulas (Ph.D., 2020) is curator of art at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. She joined the Bruce in November 2021 after serving for four years as assistant curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum. The new Bruce opened in April 2023 with a vastly expanded space and the addition of the William L. Richter Art Wing, which nearly doubled the square footage of the Museum. Karasoulas curated eight opening exhibitions including Lois Dodd: Natural Order; James Castle: Thresholds; Then Is Now: Contemporary Black Art in America; Material Matters: The Sculptures of Elie Nadelman; and Gabriel Dawe: Plexus no. 43 and has since opened several additional exhibitions including Anila Quayyum Agha: Dualities, Tracing Lineage: Abstraction and its Aftermath, and Hockney/Origins: Early Works from the Roy B. and Edith J. Simpson Collection.

She worked with several former UD students to realize these exhibitions, including Kristen Nassif and Jessica Larson, and now has the pleasure of working with Jordan Hillman (Ph.D. 2023), who joined the museum as curatorial associate in December 2023.

While at UD, Karasoulas served as the the Alfred Appel, Jr. Curatorial Fellow at the Delaware Art Museum, where she curated the exhibition The Puzzling World of John Sloan (2016). She was the 2016-2017 the Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she began research for her dissertation on the Ashcan School and immigration before joining the Brooklyn Museum.​

When Christine Oaklander (Ph.D. 1999), a private art consultant, saw an embroidery of a clipper ship in an antique shop, she bought it. She knew it depicted the famous mid-nineteenth century “Flying Cloud," and was likely the work of Mary Ellen Crisp, an entrepreneurial needle-worker. She knew this because she was familiar with the work of her classmate Cynthia Fowler (Ph.D. 2002), now a professor at Emmanuel College. Fowler researches modern American women artists working in the textile arts, with books and exhibitions on topics such as hooked rugs and figures such as Marguerite Zorach and, of course, Crisp.

Knowing Fowler's 2018 book The Modern Embroidery Movement, which discusses Crisp, Oaklander reached out. Fowler graciously agreed to speak with Dr. Laura Johnson, the textile curator at the Winterthur Museum, who was interested in acquiring Crisp's work for their collection. Johnson, in turn, earned her Ph.D.in the History of American Civilization from UD in 2011.

Oaklander has in fact found, verified and sold a number of fine and decorative artworks made by women artists, both well-known and newly rediscovered. Working with another UD alumna, Heather Campbell Coyle (Ph.D. 2011), chief curator at the Delaware Art Museum, she sold a Jazz Age illustration by Anglo-American designer and illustrator Edward McKnight Kauffer. Two other works by women artists that Oaklander has placed with museums include a circa 1820 painting of Niagara Falls by Boston artist Louisa Minot, now in the collection of the Baltimore Art Museum, and a half life-sized terra cotta bust of an African-American youth, sculpted in the 1930s by Annetta Saint-Gaudens, sister-in-law and studio assistant to the far more famous Augustus. Oaklander treasures her close relationships with art historians and museum curators, more than a few of whom passed through our art history program, for personal reasons as well as professional.

In October 2023, Jeff Richmond-Moll (Ph.D., 2019) began a new role as the George Putnam Curator of American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum. Last year, he also published several articles and essays, including in the exhibition catalogues Object Lessons in American Art (Princeton University Press) and Southern/Modern (UNC Press), an essay on the magic realist Brian Connelly in The Unforgettables: Expanding the History of American Art (UC Press) and an article on John Steuart Curry and Midwestern mobility in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.

One of Richmond-Moll's recent exhibitions, "Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund," is still traveling the country, appearing most recently at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia and the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, accompanied by a book from the University of Georgia Press.

His last show at the Georgia Museum of Art opened in January, titled "Kei Ito: Staring at the Face of the Sun." At PEM, among other new projects, he is the venue curator of a 2025 exhibition of American masterworks from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, organized by fellow Blue Hen alumna Anna Marley.​

After graduating from UD, Rebeccah Swerdlow (M.A. 2019) was faced with finding employment during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when museums, universities and cultural institutions alike were closing to the public and entering hiring freezes. Shifting gears, she earned her security clearance as a government contractor and worked for the Department of State and Department of Defense, while also working part-time as a virtual tour guide to stay connected to art and museums.

While working as a library assistant at the Naval History and Heritage Command at the Washington Navy Yard, she took online courses from the Society of American Archivists. As her contract came to an end, Swerdlow earned a new position with Digital Transitions as a digital imaging specialist. Over the next two years, she trained and digitized thousands of items for various cultural institutions such as Leo Baeck Institute, Princeton University Library and the Archives of American Art.

In 2023, she was recruited by Museum of the Bible (MOTB) to be their first hire for their brand-new Digital Imaging Lab, tasked with building their new department from the ground up.

Since then, Swerdlow has been working closely with curators, registrars and chief officers to design and implement workflows, plan future projects and hire interns. She digitizes the bound material at MOTB with specialized photography equipment and tests new software and technology. In addition, a new digitization device was custom made specifically for her position at MOTB to digitize ancient Torah scrolls.​

​In 2023, The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, promoted Karli Wurzelbacher (Ph.D., 2018) to the position of chief curator. That summer, she presented the first retrospective of the work of Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock, b. 1980). Wurzelbacher also collaborated with Spencer Wigmore, Ph.D. 2020, on an exhibition of works on paper by American modernists Arthur Dove and Helen Torr. She contributed an essay on Louise Nevelson and the Colonial Revival to The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury (Amon Carter Museum of American Art/Yale University Press, 2023) and an essay on George Grosz's experiences of World War II to George Grosz: The Stick Men (Das kleine Grosz Museum/Walther König, 2023).​