Instructors at the Barnes
Classes at the Barnes Foundation are taught by an expert group of art historians, curators, conservators, and practicing artists.
Sheila Barker
Barker has a PhD in art history from Columbia University. She is director of the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists at the Medici Archive Project and adjunct associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications, including Artemisia Gentileschi (Getty, 2022), have advanced knowledge of pioneering female artists such as Plautilla Nelli, Lucrezia Quistelli, Giovanna Garzoni, and Teresa Berenice Vitelli.
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.
Barbara Buckley
Buckley is senior director of conservation and chief conservator of paintings at the Barnes. She has published frequently on the techniques of artists, including the work of Joshua Reynolds, Horace Pippin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri Matisse.
André Dombrowski
Dombrowski is associate professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. His 2013 book Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life won the Phillips Book Prize. He is currently at work on a new book that 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.
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 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.
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.
Kedra Kearis
Kearis is a senior instructor of adult education at the Barnes. She specializes in art and material culture of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections between gender, space, and the visual arts. In addition, Kearis has taught French language and literature for more than a decade.
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.
Ellen McBreen
McBreen is professor and co-chair of the Visual Art and History of Art Department at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, where she is also director of the Wheaton Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies. She is the author of Matisse’s Sculpture: The Pinup and the Primitive (Yale University Press, 2014) and essays exploring how and why visual culture by African makers was appropriated by those in Europe and the US. She has curated exhibitions including Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2020) and Matisse in the Studio (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Royal Academy, London, 2017).
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 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 currently preparing a book on cemetery sculpture as political art in the late 19th century, as well as a book on Ernest Durig, a forger of the sculptor Auguste Rodin.
Naina Saligram
Saligram specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century art in France. She has held curatorial, research, and teaching positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Barnes Foundation and earned an MA in the history of art from Yale University.
TK Smith
Smith is a Philadelphia-based writer, art critic, and curator. He is also a PhD candidate in the University of Delaware’s American civilization program. Smith received an MA in American studies and a BA in English and African American studies from Saint Louis University. His research interests lie in American art, material culture, and the built environment, and his writing has been published in Art Papers, Burnaway, and ARTS ATL.
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 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and West Chester University.
Li Sumpter
Sumpter is a scholar of art, myth, and humanities with over 15 years in museum education. In addition to Barnes Foundation courses, she teaches curatorial studies, art history, and Afrofuturism at Moore College of Art & Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and various institutions across the country. Sumpter is also a multidisciplinary artist engaged in community practice with a focus on the art of survival and DIY media. She is founder/director of the Escape Artist Initiative and MythMedia Studios and is a lead educator at the North Philly Peace Park.
Julia L. Valiela
Valiela holds a PhD in the art and architecture of early modern Europe from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. She teaches art history at universities in the Philadelphia area and specializes in the painting and sculpture of Renaissance Italy, with a particular interest in issues of gender and patronage. Her curatorial work includes research and exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Frick Collection.
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.
Jonathan Wallis
Wallis is professor of art history and humanities at Moore College of Art & Design, and served as the Penny and Bob Fox Distinguished Professor from 2015 to 2018. His current research focuses on the intersection of ethics, socially engaged art, and critical pedagogy. His work has been published in Art and the Public Sphere, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Papers of Surrealism, and Woman’s Art Journal, among others. As a curator, he’s presented exhibitions on local and international contemporary artists. Wallis received the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2013.
Carl Walsh
Walsh is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Barnes, where he is conducting an in-depth study of the collection’s Egyptian antiquities. Walsh earned a PhD from University College London and has taught at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. His research focuses on reconstructing the sensorial experiences of ancient Egyptian and Nubian peoples.
Michael Williamson
A member of the Barnes Art Team, 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.