Alumni Award Recipient
In September of 2024, the department welcomed Daniel Haxall back to Penn State as our Alumni Award recipient. Dr. Haxall, who completed his Ph.D. in 2008 under the supervision of Prof. Sarah Rich, is professor of art history at Kutztown University, where he has taught since 2010. A specialist in modern and contemporary art with a diverse range of interests, he has published on abstract expressionism and the intersection of art and sport. He has authored more than twenty-five essays, book chapters, and exhibition catalogues while presenting his research nationally and internationally. He recently curated "Figures and Projections: Selected Work from the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African-American Art" (2021) at Kutztown University. He edited Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art (Bloomsbury, 2018), and his latest work is an essay on Carrie Mae Weems and Kehinde Wiley that will appear in the Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History (2025). Prof. Haxall has been a friend and mentor to several fellow Penn State graduates, some of whom have joined the faculty at Kutztown. During his visit, Dr. Haxall gave an inspiring talk about his career path and current work, titled “From Cut and Paste to Soccer Pitch: The Many Faces of Contemporary Art.” He also met with student groups, toured the new Palmer Museum, and attended the College of Arts and Architecture Alumni Award ceremony. It was a privilege for the department to recognize his work and contributions to the field.
Alumni Updates
Isabelle Barker, B.A. (2017)
Founder and principal of 812 Maplewood Fine Art Services, Isabelle Barker is an art consultant who splits her time between Aspen, CO and Houston, TX. Her background spans guiding residential and corporate clients through the process of building their art collections.
Dr. David A. Brenneman, B.A. (1986)
David A. Brenneman was appointed the new director and CEO of Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia in September of 2024.
Theresa Kutasz Christensen, Ph.D. (2018); M.A. (2010)
In October 2024, Theresa Kutasz Christensen was thrilled to be an invited speaker for a program on women artists at Susquehanna University. The visit was organized by fellow Penn State alum Karly Etz (Ph.D. 2023), who is currently a visiting assistant professor of art history there.
Co-authored with Andaleeb Banta and Alexa Greist, Christensen’s exhibition catalogue, Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800, won the following awards from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, the Canadian Museums Association, the Independent Publisher’s Book Awards, and the Art Libraries Society of North America..
Denise Costanzo, Ph.D. (2009), M.A. (1999)
Denise Costanzo, associate professor of architecture at Penn State, began serving as associate head for graduate education in Penn State’s Department of Architecture in 2024. She presented material from her forthcoming book on postwar French, Spanish, British, and American Rome Prize fellowships in architecture in Lyon, France. Her essay on André Chatelin’s proposed French military cemetery outside Siena (1946-48) was published in a volume on architectural study travel and landscape history (Campisano, 2024). She also lectured on the architect of the Australian Parliament House, Romaldo Giurgola (1920-2016), in Canberra, Australia, as part of a multinational research project.
Gillian Greenhill Hannum, Ph.D. (1986), M.A. (1981)
Gillian Greenhill Hannum's current book project Pedagogical Reckoning: Decolonizing and Degendering the Art Historical Canon in the Classroom and Museum (with Sooran Choi, Vernon Press) is in final revisions and is now anticipated for publication in the fall of 2025. She continues to teach part-time at Manhattanville University and to edit the newsletters of the Print Club of New York, the Print Club of Albany, and the International Print Collectors' Societies.
Kimberly Henrikson, B.A. (1994)
During October, Kimberly Henrikson, executive director of the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in New York, hosted representatives from the Consulate General of Switzerland, including Swiss Ambassador Niculin Jäger, for a tour and talk at the center explaining fine art prints and printmaking. In November, she traveled to Venice, Italy, for the Biennale at the invitation of the Chairman of Culture for the Elbe Euroregion to give a talk at the U.S. pavilion about the artist Jeffrey Gibson for students and faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, Germany.
Ryan Jacobs, B.A., Minors in Architectural History & Architecture Studies (2016)
Ryan Jacobs has been living and working in Pittsburgh for the past six years with a partner and two dogs. After earning a Master of Architecture degree from Virginia Tech—spending the final thesis year at the Washington Alexandria Architecture Center (WAAC)—Jacobs began working as an Architect and Designer. Currently, he is a Design Associate at Wade Weissmann Architecture in Pittsburgh and is nearing completion of professional licensure, with just one exam remaining to become a registered architect.
Over the past 5-6 years, Jacobs has contributed to a wide range of projects, including the Grove City College Library, apartment complexes, restaurants, breweries, and residential renovations across Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, and California. Some favorite built projects include: Grove City College Library Renovation and Point Breeze/Pittsburgh Addition
Jacobs is grateful to Professors Robin Thomas and Amara Solari for their classes and guidance from 2013-2016.
Janet Marion Purdy, Ph.D. (2020)
Upon completion of a three-and-a-half-year tenure as a Mellon-Rice Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Arts of Africa at the Art Institute of Chicago in June 2023, Janet Marion Purdy assumed her current role as associate curator in textiles. She is currently organizing two exhibitions: “Textile Traditions of SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa),” opening in April 2026, and “African Dress and Design in the Twentieth Century.”
As visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago, her seminars focus on the arts and architecture of Africa. In October 2024, Purdy’s research project centered on royal cloth production in the Grassfields Kingdoms of Cameroon was selected for a Karun Thakar Fund Grant, co-sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Her recent publications include “First Word: Egypt in/and Africa: Exhibitions, Questions and Complexities in American Art Museums,” in African Arts and “The Great Mosque of Kilwa: An Architectural Lodestone,” in The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art (open access here).
Dr. Jo-Ann Reif, M.A. (2009)
In 2011, Jo-Ann Reif and her husband, Murray Small, moved from State College to Scranton, Reif’s hometown. Since 2012, she has written radio essays on various museum and college exhibitions in the arts for "ArtScene" on WVIA-FM, the northeastern Pennsylvania NPR affiliate. Of particular interest was a review of landscapes by John Willard Raught, a Scranton native who studied at the Academie Julien in Paris in the 1890s. His paintings, which include three of coal breakers, now occupy a dedicated room in the Everhart Museum. Most recently, she has reviewed a life-in-photographs exhibition on Thomas Mann at Lafayette College in Easton.
Emily Schiller, Ph.D. (2016)
Emily Schiller celebrated her tenth year at the Dallas Museum of Art, where she started as a curatorial intern and is now the senior manager of interpretation, interim head of exhibition design, and a member of the DMA's leadership team. She spent the last year traveling to sixteen cities and visiting more than sixty museums to research how museums are integrating activities into their galleries and making art relevant and engaging to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Emily regularly gives class lectures about museum interpretation and label writing to students at SMU, University of North Texas, and University of Texas at Dallas. She's curating her eighth exhibition for the DMA's Center for Creative Connections galleries and recently completed her 100th exhibition overall.
Stephanie Swindle Thomas, M.A. (2010)
Stephanie Swindle Thomas accepted a full-time assistant teaching professor position in the Bellisario College of Communications in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Penn State. She teaches courses on digital advertising and PR writing (with an arts advocacy focus) and is currently developing a course on AR/VR advertising. She remains affiliate faculty in the Department of Art History and hopes to offer her museum studies course again in the future.
Micha Winkler Thomas, B.A. (1994)
Micha Winkler Thomas joined the Harvard Art Museums in September 2023 as deputy director.
Emily Tse, B.A. (2022)
Emily Tse has been working in auction since completion of her master’s dissertation at SOAS University of London in 2024, and has been a consultant in Chinese antiques since 2023.
Dr. Lindsay Wells, B.A. (2013)
Lindsay Wells currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Architecture and Interior Design Program at UCLA Extension. She completed her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021 and has held recent fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art and the Boston Athenaeum.