Curatorial Interns & Fellows

Through internships and fellowships, the Block Museum provides undergraduate and graduate students with vital curatorial and museum experiences—from planning, researching, organizing or supporting exhibitions with curators, to shorter-term projects that contribute to museum content.

Students conduct object research, work on justifications for donation proposals, and write “collection spotlights” for the museum’s blog post. In addition to curatorial, students also have opportunities to work with staff members from departments across the museum, including exhibitions and collections, engagement and education, communications, visitors’ services, and business.

Each year, The Block hosts two graduate fellows, one student from the Department of Art History and one from another department across campus. In 2019–20, graduate fellows Cait DiMartino and Simran Bhalla contributed to The Block’s year of exploring global modernisms. Curatorial Graduate Fellow Cait DiMartino organized a collections-based installation, Regional Modernisms, as a complement to the exhibition Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection. Cait also worked with Academic Curator Corinne Granof on initial planning for the anniversary exhibition For One and All: Prints from the Block’s Collection. Cait wrote a collection spotlight on Hector Duarte’s Como te ven te tratan (How they see you, they treat you) (Gift of Molly Day and John Himmelfarb, 2007.15.3) and worked on object research for several new acquisitions. Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, Simran Bhalla, from the Department of Radio, Television, and Film, worked with Block Cinema curator, Michael Metzger, organizing screenings and programs in connection with exhibitions. She cocurated Morning Will Come: Modernity in Indian Cinema (winter 2020) and also played a central role in the development and realization of the series Liberating History: Arab Feminisms and Mediated Pasts, which was postponed until fall 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Simran also produced an insightful blog post on Barbara Helpworth’s Two Forms (Divided Circle) (Gift of Leigh B. Block, 1988.3.3) and researched Gillian Wearing’s Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth Road 1995 (Gift of Peter Norton, 2016.4. 59; 2016.4.60).

In the fall, Madeline Hultquist (Anthropology, Weinberg, 2021) joined the Block team as the first Undergraduate Research Assistant, funded through the Office of Undergraduate Research. Among Madeline’s responsibilities were research for the donation proposal and justification for three photographs by Mark Ruwedel (Gift of Gary B. Sokol, 2020.4.1–3), along with support on the collections database.

Simran Bhalla, Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow

By hosting undergraduate interns and graduate fellows, Block staff aspires to provide rich and layered real work experiences and enable students to gain stronger skill sets, including writing for museum audiences and the broader public, working in a collection database. As fully engaged members of the staff, students come away with a deeper understanding of the curatorial profession and the roles of academic museums within it.

– Essi Rönkkö,

Associate Curator of Collections

– Corinne Granof,

Academic Curator