NYU CC Coordinators

Black and White portrait of Madi Shenk.Madi Shenk (she/her/they/them) is an art historian, curator, and writer based in Queens, NY. Shenk’s scholarship revolves around queer and feminist perspectives of 20th century and contemporary art, material theory, and disability studies. Her current research focuses on photomontage figuration as a means of dismantling body normativity and binary understandings of gender. Shenk has held positions at the Kohl Gallery (Chestertown, MD), the National Portrait Gallery (Washington D.C.), the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia, PA), and Morgan Walker Fine Art (New York, NY). In addition to curating an exhibition through the Curatorial Collaborative in Spring, 2022, she has also curated shows for Spring/Break NY and Land to Sea in Brooklyn. She will receive her M.A. from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in May, 2023. 


A veteran of the curatorial collaborative program, Elyse Howell is a second year MA student at the Institute who helped curate the 2022 Group Show, Retro/Intro. In addition to being an NYU CC Coordinator, Elyse serves as the Communications Chair and Co-Social Chair of the Graduate Student Association at the IFA, as well as an Assistant in the Digital Media and Computer Services Department. She was awarded undergraduate degrees in both history and art history from Franklin and Marshall College, as well as Franklin and Marshall’s Marshall Fellow Research Grant, the Frederick C. Schaffer Prize for Excellence in History, and the Robert M. and Elizabeth Hatton Landis Award for Scholarship and Leadership in Art History. Her particular interest is in both decorative arts and historic interiors. Prior to attending the Institute, Elyse held positions in auction houses such as Phillips and Heritage Auctions. She will receive her M.A. from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in May, 2023.


Noa Wynn (she/her/hers) is a writer, curator, and art historian based in New York. She is a second-year master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She has a BFA in photography, emerging media, and art history from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Noa has held positions at Nicola Vassell, Fort Gansevoort, and Whitewall Art Magazine. She is currently a curatorial assistant for Isolde Brielmaier, Ph.D, the deputy director of the New Museum. She is a curatorial assistant for an upcoming show at International Center of Photography (ICP). She is further involved with the Guggenheim Museum, Jewish Museum, and the Israel Museum. Her art criticism has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Whitewall, Musée, and Buffalo Rising. Noa is also a co-coordinator for the NYU Curatorial Collaborative. She will receive her M.A. from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in May, 2023.


Past Coordinators

Emma Flood is a master’s candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, specializing in early 20th-century American art and feminist art. She was previously a NYU Curatorial Collaborative curator for the virtual group show Imperfect In Its Cracks: Fragments of Memory and Identity. She is also the IFA GSA Communications and Social Chair and a co-editor of IFAcontemporary for the 2021-2022 academic year. Before attending the IFA, she held positions at the Bell Museum of Natural History and the Science Museum of Minnesota. Emma earned her B.A. from St. Catherine University, where she majored in both Art History and Philosophy, and minored in Women and the Arts. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.


McKenna Quatro Johnson is a master’s candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts specializing in Modern and Contemporary Art with an emphasis in American feminist work from the 1960s to the present. Her thesis research concerns questions of anonymity, power, and embodied experience. This is her first year working with the NYU Curatorial Collaborative as a Co-Coordinator. Before attending the IFA, McKenna spent time working for a grant-funding nonprofit as a Content Creator. McKenna earned her B.A. from Washington and Lee University, where she majored in both Anthropology and Studio Art and worked with the University’s Staniar Gallery and Art Department. She has participated in a number of University-sponsored and independant exhibitions as both an artist and a curator and looks forward to growing this skill set through the NYU Curatorial Collaborative.


Madeleine Morris is a master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, with a focus on twentieth century American art, and folk or outlier art in particular. After graduating Vassar College cum laude with a B.A. in Studio Art and Italian, she worked for five years as the director of the gallery Davis & Langdale Company, New York. In that position, she collaborated on exhibitions of contemporary artists like Sheila Hicks and Janet Malcolm and co-curated exhibitions of artworks by Anne Ryan, Gwen John, and Albert York, among others. As one of the curators for the Curatorial Collaborative exhibitions in 2020-2021, Madeleine curated an exhibition of two artists, Giovanna Pedrinola and Shane Weiss, entitled Embodied Space.


Originally from Dallas, TX, Isla Stewart is currently a second-year master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American sculpture. She is broadly interested in investigating the largely untold histories surrounding female sculptors working in the United States. Her research centers around questions of gender, race, and memory in monumental public sculpture from post-Civil War to the nineteenth-amendment’s ratification. She previously earned her B.A. from Trinity University, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on Jesús F. Contreras’s Malgré Tout. As a first-time Coordinator working with the Curatorial Collaborative, Isla has thoroughly enjoyed learning from her fellow coordinators and participating in this thoughtful  initiative.


Katie Johndrow was a master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, concentrating in medieval art. Her research interests include the art of early Christian Ireland and particularly the exploration of materiality in early Irish gospel books. After graduating Summa Cum Laude from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she moved to Newport, RI where she became a Team Leader for the Newport Mansions. There she managed the daily operations for Rosecliff, a gilded age house museum with special exhibition galleries. Katie then went on to become the Marketing Manager for the Newport Music Festival during their 51st season. She edited the program book, managed over 50 events, and organized a successful auction to benefit the organization. Upon graduation she looks forward to returning to work and travel.


Charlotte Kinberger was a master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on modern and contemporary art of the Americas. Her research interests include revisionist histories of Modernism, material culture and design, and feminist and critical race theory. Charlotte completed her BA in Art History and Material Culture at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Oxford, and has held internship positions at Whitewall magazine, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Grey Art Gallery, NYU. Before attending graduate school, she served as the Gallery Manager at James Fuentes, New York, and the Assistant Director at Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco. After serving as a curator for the 2019-2020 season of the NYU Curatorial Collaborative, Charlotte has returned as a program coordinator.  


""Lilia Kudelia was a master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts. Her research focuses on art and television, land art, and art in the postcommunist states. As a 2021 guest curator at Residency Unlimited in New York, she develops residencies for the finalists of the Young Visual Artists Awards (YVAA), a program for artists from Central and Eastern Europe supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding. In 2013-2018, Kudelia was the assistant curator at Dallas Contemporary in Dallas, TX. In 2017, she co-curated Ukrainian National Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale that featured work by photographer Boris Mikhailov. She held curatorial and research positions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Art Arsenal in Kyiv, Ukraine. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto, Canada, and received her undergraduate degree in Cultural Studies from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine.


Katie Maher was a master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, specializing in modern and contemporary American art. Her current research focuses on Mary Corse’s White Light paintings from the late 1960s, and investigates Corse’s relationship to California Light and Space art. Since graduating from Georgetown in 2019 with a dual degree in Art History and French, Katie has held internships at The Museum of Modern Art and Gagosian. After curating Tracing History Through Myth with artists Martine Velasco and Andy Wang in the 2019-2020 season of the NYU Curatorial Collaborative, Maher became one of the program’s coordinators this year.

Phoebe Herland was a master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a focus on modern and contemporary art.  Her current scholarship investigates post-war British and American art, with particular interest in the cross-cultural exchange between London and Los Angeles. Since receiving her undergraduate degree from Bard College in upstate New York, Phoebe has held positions at the Guggenheim, the Armory Show and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City. After curating body building, body blurring, body breaking with artists Jackie Kong and Nathan Storey Freeman in the 2017-18 season of the NYU Curatorial Collaborative, Herland has taken on a position as a program coordinator.


Sarah Myers was master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, specializing in Contemporary Art and Photography. She graduated from New York University with a Bachelor’s in Art History and minors in German and Studio Art in 2017. At NYU, she completed her undergraduate thesis “A Model World: Constructing Reality in Contemporary Photography” (2017). She has held both editorial and curatorial internship positions at Art in America, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, and in the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In her art historical research, Myers focuses on the intersection of Conceptual Art and Photography in the 1970s, architectural modeling in photography, and the use of phenomenology, structuralism and semiology as art historical methodologies.


Kiki Barnes was a master’s candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts focusing on modern and contemporary art and the history of painting. After receiving a B.A. in Visual Art at Brown University, Kiki served as a project manager for the advertising agency Digitas, where she worked on American Express business customer marketing. She has also held positions at PBS FRONTLINE and the Merchant’s House Museum.


Joyce_headshot_CC (1)Kathleen Robin Joyce is a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, specializing in modern American printmaking. They are a research assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in the department of Drawings and Prints and have interned at the Morgan Library and Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the International Print Center New York. Kathleen’s previous curatorial work includes no time like the present. for ghosts. through the 2015–2016 Curatorial Collaborative and Beatrice Glow: Spice Roots/Routes through the 2016–2017 Duke House Exhibition Series at the Institute of Fine Arts. Kathleen received their BA in Art History, English, and Theater and Performance Studies from Georgetown University and their MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts. Their research interests include temporality, cybernetics, and labor.


Haley S. Pierce_headshotHaley S. Pierce was a master’s student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, focusing on late 19th and early 20th century European Modernism with an interest in the translation of print design to painting in fin-de-siècle France. Originally from Kentucky, she received her BA in Art History with minors in Studio Art and French from the College of Charleston. Previously, Pierce has worked in contemporary galleries and conservation studios, and completed curatorial internships at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and will be interning in the European Paintings department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Spring 2018. Having curated Way Out / Away Out with artists Anna Marchisello and Phoebe Louise Randall in the 2016-17 season of the NYU Curatorial Collaborative, Pierce is currently involved as a curator and co-coordinator of the Institute of Fine Art’s Great Hall Exhibition Series, which presented the work of contemporary artist, Judith Hopf for the Fall 2017 exhibit.


IMG_1326Ksenia M. Soboleva is Russian born/Dutch raised/New York based writer, art historian and curator. Having received her BA in Art History from Utrecht University and her MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, she is currently a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. In her art historical research, Soboleva focuses on the lasting impact of the AIDS crisis and queer narratives in contemporary art. Previously, she has worked at Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, assisted Boris Groys with a show on nonconformist Russian art at e-flux and James Gallery, and explored the queer aspects of Charles Simonds’ work. Having curated still with artists David Bransfield and Emma Strebel in the 2014-15 season of the NYU Curatorial Collaborative, Soboleva went on to become co-coordinator with Madeline Murphy Turner until 2017.


Turner.PictureMadeline Murphy Turner was a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She specializes in modern and contemporary art from Latin America and Spain, with a focus on performance art and theory. Turner is especially interested in the role of the body and spectatorship in performances by women artists. She has curated exhibitions that tackle a wide range of subjects, including Spanish informalism, Hudson River School painting, and contemporary sound installation. In addition to her curatorial projects, Turner recently worked on the Joaquín Torres-García Catalogue Raisonné. Previously, she helped develop Transcommunality, an ongoing exhibition and project by interdisciplinary artist Laura Anderson Barbata, and contributed research to the Cisneros Collection’s 2013 exhibition La Invención Concreta.

Turner is one of the original founders of the NYU Curatorial Collaborative and acted as coordinator from 2014 – 2017. She currently teaches contemporary art in NYU’s Steinhardt School.