Instructors at the Barnes

Classes at the Barnes Foundation are taught by an expert group of art historians, curators, conservators, and practicing artists.

Leslie Bowen
Bowen previously taught at Lebanon Valley College, where she received the Nevelyn J. Knisley Award for Inspirational Teaching. A painter, she exhibits extensively and has participated in programs at the Paris American Academy, the Salzburg International Summer Academy, and Southampton College in New York.

Sheila Barker
Barker is the executive director of Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia and an adjunct associate professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from Amherst College and an MA and a PhD in art history from Columbia University. Barker’s research and publications cover a wide range of topics in cultural history, including the early modern history of plague art, women artists, pharmacy, and the cultural politics of the Medici grand dukes. Her recent books include Artemisia Gentileschi (Getty, 2021).

Alison Boyd
Boyd is director of research and interpretation at the Barnes. She studies the intersection of multiple modernisms in American and European art in the first half of the 20th century, with a focus on the arts of the African diaspora and the politics of museum display. She taught art history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held research positions as a postdoctoral associate at the Phillips Collection’s Center for Art and Knowledge, a Terra Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.

Christa DiMarco
DiMarco is associate professor, director of art history, and coordinator of the interdisciplinary art BFA at the University of the Arts. She specializes in 19th-century European painting, with a focus on Van Gogh’s two-year stay in Paris. Her recent publications include “Van Gogh’s Parisian Gardens on the Butte Montmartre” in Nineteenth-Century Studies and “Marginal Space: Van Gogh’s and Signac’s Parisian Industrial Landscapes” in Perspective: Selected Essays on Space in Art and Design (Vernon Press).

André Dombrowski
Dombrowski is Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th-Century European Art at the University of Pennsylvania. His 2013 book, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life, won the Phillips Book Prize, and his newest book Monet's Minutes (Yale University Press, 2023) explores the relationship between the impressionist instant and period technologies of timekeeping.

Joseph Tokumasu Field
Tokumasu Field earned his MA in curating at Richmond University, London, and specializes in modern, contemporary, and Asian art. He has taught at Brooklyn College, the 92nd Street Y, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, and the Guggenheim Museum, all in New York. He works to provide access to art for all, highlighting marginalized artists and centering people over objects in his teaching practice.

Roksana Filipowska
Filipowska is a researcher, educator, writer, and meditation facilitator interested in the intersections of art, science, and wholeness. Filipowska has a PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and developed Being Present with Art—a method of art engagement that integrates museum pedagogy with mindfulness-based stress reduction meditation (MBSR)—while serving as the Wurtele Study Center Programs and Outreach Manager at the Yale University Art Gallery. She is an arts, culture, and equity consultant at Keen Independent Research.

Laurel Garber
Garber is the Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she works with the museum’s collection of modern and contemporary works on paper. In 2021, she organized Emma Amos: Color Odyssey. She received her BA from Cornell University, MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and PhD from Northwestern University.

Amy Gillette
Gillette is a research associate at the Barnes. She earned her PhD in art history from Temple University, specializing in late medieval art and architecture. Her publications address the music of angels in Gothic and Byzantine art and the formation of medieval collections in Philadelphia during the Gothic Revival movement.

Al Gury
Gury is chair of painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he teaches drawing, painting, and art history. A painter of landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and figures, he also exhibits at F.A.N. Gallery in Philadelphia and other galleries around the country. He is the author of three books on art and numerous articles published nationally and internationally.

Leah Triplett Harrington
Harrington is director of exhibitions and contemporary curatorial initiatives at the PAFA. She was previously a curator at Now + There, in Boston, where she facilitated the Public Art Accelerator and organized large-scale public art commissions. Her writing has appeared in ArtNet News, Sculpture, Public Art Dialogue, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, and the Brooklyn Rail. She taught MFA painting and sculpture students at Boston University from 2021 to 2023.

Kaelin Jewell
Jewell is a senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes. She holds a PhD in late Roman and early medieval art history from Temple University and has worked as a field archeologist. In addition to her work at the Barnes, Jewell is the art historian for an underwater archaeology project near the Sicilian town of Marzamemi.

Martha Lucy
Lucy is the deputy director for research, interpretation and education at the Barnes. As an art historian, she specializes in modern European art and visual culture. She is the coauthor of Renoir in the Barnes Foundation and has published articles and essays on topics ranging from the early charcoals of Odilon Redon to contemporary installation art.

Anna O. Marley
Marley is chief of curatorial affairs and Kenneth R. Woodcock Curator of Historical American Art at PAFA. A scholar of American art and material culture from the colonial era to the present, she holds a BA in art history from Vassar College, an MA in museum studies from the University of Southern California, and a PhD from the University of Delaware. At PAFA, Marley has curated more than 16 exhibitions, including the major touring shows Making American Artists (2022), The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement (2015), and Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit (2012).

Emily Neumeier
Neumeier is an assistant professor of art history in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Her scholarship and teaching examine the visual and spatial cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the Ottoman Empire. Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Fulbright Program.

Matthew Palczynski
Palczynski is an art history lecturer, consultant, curator, and educator for academic, corporate, and nonprofit institutions. He regularly leads sessions on innovation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, teaches art history at Tyler School of Art and the Barnes, and presents lectures worldwide for Road Scholar.

William Perthes
Perthes is the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education at the Barnes. He has taught courses at the Barnes as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and West Chester and Villanova Universities. His scholarship focuses on American modernism and the abstract expressionist painter Robert Motherwell.

Caterina Y. Pierre
Pierre is a professor of art history at the City University of New York at Kingsborough Community College and visiting associate professor at the Pratt Institute, New York. She has taught about art and crime at CUNY Kingsborough, Pratt, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York. She is working on books about cemetery sculpture as political art in the late 19th century, and Ernest Durig, a forger of the sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Naina Saligram
Saligram is a fellow researching the 46 works by Picasso in the Barnes. She has held curatorial, research, and teaching positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery and has previously taught Barnes classes on subjects including primitivism and surrealism.

Stuart Shils
Shils, a Philadelphia native, has been a painter for more than 40 years. His passion for the visual world was shaped early on during childhood urban train rides, where glass windows would “condense light and landscape into an almost theological visual presence.” Shils studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and has had solo exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Davis & Langdale, and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Christine Stoughton
Stoughton is a psychologist, art educator, sculptor, and printmaker. An instructor for the Barnes–de Mazia Education Program, she has also taught with the Violette de Mazia Foundation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and West Chester University.

Jennifer Thompson
Thompson is the Gloria and Jack Drosdick Curator of European Painting & Sculpture and curator of the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has curated several exhibitions on impressionism, including The Impressionist’s Eye; Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting; Van Gogh Up Close; and Late Renoir. She is curator of the Rodin Museum and earned her MA and PhD at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Ty Vanover
Vanover is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in 19th- and early 20th-century Central European art and visual culture. His research focuses on drawing and the graphic arts within the context of German sexual science between 1869 and 1933. His work has been supported by museums and universities across Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom.

Laura L. Watts
Watts is professor emerita in art history at Daemen University, in Amherst, New York, and has taught for more than 30 years on subjects including modernism, contemporary art, and visual literacy. Her book Italian Painting in the Age of Unification (Routledge, 2021) won the Visual Arts Award from the American Association of Italian Studies. She is currently researching the artistic connections between Bermuda and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Ashley West
West is an associate professor of Northern Renaissance and Baroque art at Temple University and the vice president of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. She studies intersections between art and the history of science, processes of cultural transmission and the dissemination of knowledge, and opportunities for artistic exchange through print culture, travel and portable objects, pilgrimages, warfare, global trade, and early collecting practices.

Michael Williamson
A member of the Barnes faculty, Williamson studied at Yale University and the Milton Avery Graduate School of Bard College. He taught art history and studio art for nearly 30 years at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. Williamson has an active art practice and has shown his paintings locally.