Graduate Student

Riad Kherdeen

Riad Kherdeen (2016) studies global modern art and architecture, with a focus on the region of West Asia/Middle East and North Africa (MENA). His dissertation project, titled “Spectral Modernisms: Decolonial Aesthetics and the Art of Resistance in Early Post-Protectorate Morocco,” is a novel study of modernist art and architecture in Morocco between the 1950s and 1970s. Riad’s interests fall within three main clusters of study: the first is in comparative and planetary modernisms via postcolonial studies and critical theory; the second is in the study of perception, including aesthetics,...

Andrea Jung-An Liu

Andrea Jung-An Liu (2018) studies Modern East Asian Art, with a focus on the artistic productions across the Japanese Empire. She takes a special interest in tracing the trans-national and trans-medial history of Japanese modern art while interrogating the formation of art historiography and art criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. She is also interested in critical and postcolonial theory, the politics of display, and the relationship between war, propaganda and art. Before moving to Berkeley for her PhD studies, she interned at MoMA in NYC and worked for the...

Brishti Modak

Brishti Modak (2023) studies the intersections between public sculpture, reception, and decolonization in twentieth-century India. Her research more broadly also looks into art institutional histories, materiality, and feminist art practice.

She has a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy from Presidency University (Kolkata) and a Masters' in Art History from Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi). In 2021, she earned her M.Phil. degree from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta in 2019. Since then, she has worked at Critical...

Kevin Morales-Bernabe

Kevin G. Morales-Bernabe (2023) studies the Arts and Material Culture of the Buddhist World. His research encompasses topics related to death, dying, funerary rituals, and the afterlife in artistic traditions within tantric religions of South Asia. Kevin’s interests also include trans-regional exchange and religious interactions across Medieval South Asia and the Himalayas.

Kevin earned his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies and Art History from the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras campus (2019). In 2021, he completed his MPhil from the...

Madeleine Morris

Madeleine Morris (2022) studies twentieth-century art of the United States with a focus on the interactions between folk art and modernism. She received her MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, in 2022 where she researched interwar US folk and outlier art. Madeleine received a BA in Studio Art and Italian from Vassar College in 2014 and served as the director of Davis & Langdale Company, an art gallery in New York City, from 2016 through 2021. Her research interests include cultural exchange across North American borders, nationalism and national identity, and the...

Atineh Movsesian

Atineh Movsesian (2022) specializes in Medieval Armenian Art and Architecture. Her research concerns the interactions across medieval Armenia, Byzantium, and the Islamic worlds. She aims to bring awareness to the connected and global dimensions of Armenian art and architecture.

Atineh earned her BA in Art History from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (2019), with minors in English and French. Her undergraduate thesis, “The Medieval City of Ani: Above and Underground,” offered initial art historical examination of the Ani caves and earned an outstanding research...

Tausif Noor

Tausif Noor studies global modern and contemporary art with a focus on South Asia and its histories of decolonization. He is interested in the intersections of art and politics, particularly with regard to histories of nationalism and internationalism, postcolonialism, and Marxist thought. He holds a BA in art history and government from Dartmouth College, an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and was a 2014-15 Fulbright Student Fellow in India, where he worked on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and at the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. Tausif has...

Angela Pastorelli-Sosa

Angela (2018) studies modern and contemporary Latinx and Latin American printmaking and paper communities. Her research focuses on post-war artist networks that explore the conceptual underpinnings of paper to engage in transnational dialogues about liberation, history, and identity. She received her BA in Art History from Williams College in 2016, and subsequently spent a year in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Drawings and Prints department before going on to work at Rosenberg & Co. art gallery in New York.

Ariana Pemberton

Ariana Pemberton (2018) studies Art and Material History of Medieval South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. Her interests include trans-regional exchanges across the Indian Ocean, eco-conscious histories of non-human animals and the environment, and the use of materiality-based methodologies. She is currently writing her dissertation on South Asian ivory carved objects and the ivory trade of the Indian Ocean world between the eighth and fifteenth centuries CE. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in 2017. In 2022, she completed her MA thesis on the Firuz Minar, a brick and...

Yessica Liliana Porras

Yessica Porras (2015) is a first-year PhD student focusing on Colonial Latin American art. After years away from her native country of Colombia, she developed an interest in art history as a way of learning more about her culture and expanding the knowledge of this understudied area. She is looking forward to beginning her work under the guidance of Todd Olson and Lisa Trever. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2014. Here she developed an interest in the intersection between colonial and indigenous cultures,
represented in in her Honors Thesis Church of St. John the Baptist at Sutatausa...