Claire Ittner

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Claire Ittner (2024) studies modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with interests in the art and
visual culture of the African Diaspora in the American South and Caribbean. Her research
interests include mobility and migration, patronage networks and theories of artistic value, and
systems of training and credentialling. Her dissertation project, Fellow Travelers: The Artist-
Researchers of the Rosenwald Fellowship Program, 1928-1948, examines the relationship
between the non-profit sector and the arts, focusing on the merit-based fellowship programs that
emerged as an important source of artistic support in the first half of the twentieth century.
Examining one such fellowship program, the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship program, the
project tracks the ways its support was utilized by a generation of Black artists, and its role in
forging new ideas about artmaking as a form of research. Claire’s research has been published in
Nka: A Journal of Contemporary African Art and the Metropolitan Museum Journal, and
supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Henry Luce Foundation/American
Council of Learned Societies, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds an MA from
Berkeley and a BA from Davidson College. She will begin as Assistant Professor of Art History
at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro in the Fall of 2024.

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