New Faculty Appointments for 2022

The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, is pleased to announce the appointment of Catherine Quan Damman as the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor for a three-year term. We are also delighted to announce the appointment of Alexandra Courtois de Viçose as Visiting Assistant Professor of 19thcentury European Art. Both colleagues will begin on September 1, 2022.

Catherine Quan Damman will teach seminars and lectures focusing on the work of contemporary women artists from a broad, multimedia, and global perspective. Her work as a scholar and critic also addresses gender and sexuality studies, feminist approaches to art history, and critical race studies. Dr. Damman is completing her first monograph,

Performance: A Deceptive History with a 2022–2023 ACLS Fellowship. Work on the project has also been supported by a research grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art and a two-year Chester Dale Predoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University, where she was concurrently on the faculty of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance graduate program. She has also been a Core Lecturer in Art History at Columbia University, where she completed her PhD in 2018. An active critic, she is a frequent contributor to Artforum. Her writing can also be found in Bookforum, BOMB, 4Columns, Frieze, Art in America, and elsewhere. Alexandra Courtois de Viçose’s research draws from disability studies and disability history to address unexplored facets of late 19th-century European visual culture. Prior to her career in academia, Alexandra worked in theater and then in special-effects make-up in Los Angeles, CA. During her graduate tenure at UCBerkeley, she held a four-year Jacob K. Javits fellowship, a UNA fellowship for women in history, a Georges Lurcy fellowship in Paris, a Goldman Graduate Fund Fellowship, and she received two teaching awards. Kenyon College, where she has taught for the past four years, recently awarded her two Faculty Research Grants.

Dr. Courtois’s current book project examines Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s oeuvre and life through questions informed by the social model of disability studies; her second scholarly project will examine the art of French artist Jean Veber (1864-1928) and his recurrent depictions of leg amputee figures in both satirical newspaper cartoons and easel paintings. Her classes investigate European art, politics, and culture, but also global networks of pictorial expression.

The Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to announce the appointments of Dr. Glennis Rayermann as Visiting Assistant Professor of Conservation Science and Lisa Conte as Visiting Associate Professor of Paper Conservation. Both appointments are a one-year position, renewable to three years. Both positions begin on September 1, 2022.

Dr. Rayermann is currently a Research Associate with the Netherlands Institute for Conservation+Art+Science+ (NICAS) in Amsterdam, a position funded by the Mellon Foundation, where she is specializing in the heritage science of metal, glass, stone, and ceramic objects. She received her doctorate in chemistry from the University of Washington in 2018 after her MS in chemistry at the same institution, and a BS in chemistry with distinction from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA. Dr. Rayermann completed a graduate conservation science internship at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, focusing on the technical study of a forged panel painting attributed to Icilio Federico Joni. In 2020 she was Lecturer at the Garman Art Conservation Department at the State University of New York, Buffalo State, a position she followed with a research appointment at the department, studying the possibility of non-invasive examination of modern sports trading cards.

Lisa Conte is currently the Head of Conservation at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, a position she has held since 2017. She specializes in the conservation of modern and contemporary works on paper, and has previously held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Scott Gerson Conservation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received a BA in English and Studio Art from William Smith College and an MA in Art History and an Advanced Certificate in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Ms. Conte has taught at the Institute of Fine Arts, both within the Conservation Center curriculum and in the Summer Institute in Technical Art History for doctoral students in art history, as well as for the Museum Studies Program of NYU, among other institutions. Her current research interests include the ethical considerations related to the preservation of spontaneous memorials and other objects associated with traumatic history. In the fall of 2021, she presented the preservation of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum’s collection for the Walter W. S. Cook Annual Lecture series, which invites prominent Institute alumni to speak.

The Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU will welcome Bertrand Lavédrine as the 2022–2023 Judith Praska Visiting Distinguished Professor in Conservation & Technical Studies. Dr. Lavédrine is a professor at the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Sorbonne University Alliance, and a scientist at Center for Research in Conservation in Paris. He is an internationally recognized expert in the chemistry and preservation of photographs and the author of several books and articles on historical processes.

Now in its tenth year, the Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professorship has brought eighteen scholars to the Institute since 2012. Generously funded by an anonymous donor, the professorship recognizes preeminent conservation professionals who bring new areas of teaching and research to the Institute’s program in conservation. Dr. Lavédrine will teach a course entitled Research & Communication in Conservation & Science, and will deliver a public lecture during his tenure.

Bertrand Lavédrine is a professor at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN) and a scientist at the Centre de Recherche sur la Conservation (CRC) in Paris. He holds a master’s degree in organic chemistry and a doctoral degree in Art and Archeology from the Faculty of Humanities, University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. From 2003 to 2007, he was appointed as the director of the conservation training program at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has written papers and books on the preservation of photographic collections, now available in several languages (French, English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Vietnamese). Dr. Lavédrine also leads research into the characterization and degradation of plastics––he was coordinator of the European funded project “POPART” (Preservation Of Plastic Artifacts in museum collections)—and the nondestructive identification of dyes and pigments used in manuscript illumination. He has participated in various international training programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Conservation Institute, the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), and research projects funded by the European commission.