C. Ondine Chavoya holds a John D. Murchison Regents Professorship in Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. A specialist in Chicanx and Latinx art, Chavoya is co-editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (2019).
From 2002 to 2022, Chavoya was a professor of art history and Latinx studies at Williams College, where he was a cofounder of the College’s interdisciplinary program in Latinx studies. Prior to Williams, Chavoya taught contemporary art and visual culture at RISD and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Chavoya is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied art history and comparative literature, and the University of Rochester (PhD, 2002).
Chavoya’s curatorial projects have addressed issues of collaboration, experimentation, social justice, and archival practices in contemporary art. Previous exhibitions include Michel Auder: Chronicles and Other Scenes (with Lisa Dorin, 2004), Asco: Elite of the Obscure (with Rita Gonzalez, 2011), Robert Rauschenberg: Autobiography (with Lisa Dorin, 2017), and Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (with David Evans Frantz, 2017). The exhibition catalogue for Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (2017) garnered nine international book awards, including a 2018 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC). Chavoya has reunited with curator David Evans Frantz to develop Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, an exhibition co-organized with the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College, the Williams College Museum of Art, and Independent Curators International, which will open in fall 2023.
Anne Anlin Cheng is a professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Program in American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Committee on Film Studies at Princeton University. Prior to Princeton, she taught at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. She is a comparative race scholar whose research focuses on the intersection between politics and aesthetics. Her work draws from literary theory, visual culture, modernism, race and gender studies, film and architectural theory, legal studies, and psychoanalysis. She works primarily with 20th-century American, Asian American, and African American literatures and visual cultures. She is the author of three books: The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; and, most recently, Ornamentalism. Her writing can also be found in the Nation, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post. Her new book of personal essays, Ordinary Disasters, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.
Cheng is the founder and organizer of the public conversation series Critical Encounters, which promotes dialogue between art and theory and encourages cross-disciplinary conversations on topics of social justice. She is one of the founders of a new experimental research platform at Princeton called the American Studies Collaboratory—the AMS Col(LAB)—that nurtures cross-campus research affinities that bring together scholars and students from the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences to explore how issues such as identity or citizenship shape and are shaped by law, the arts, literature, sexuality, space, and more.
Sherrilyn Ifill’s research at MoMA will focus on exploring artistic expressions of American identity that reflect the values and promises of the post–Civil War 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Ifill is a renowned scholar and civil rights lawyer who for a decade led the nation’s premier civil-rights legal organization, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She is widely recognized as an expert on race, civil rights, and the Supreme Court. Since stepping down from LDF in 2022, Ifill has served as a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation, and she is completing the manuscript for a book, titled Is This America?, to be published by Penguin Press in 2024. Ifill is a prolific scholar who served for 20 years as a professor of law at University of Maryland Law School. Her 2008 book On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 20th Century was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Book Award, and is credited with laying the foundation for contemporary conversations about lynching and reparations. Ifill was appointed to President Biden’s Supreme Court Commission in 2021, and was named as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine. In 2019, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the Radcliffe Medal, the Brandeis Medal, and the Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Bar Association. Ifill received her undergraduate degree from Vassar College and her law degree from New York University School of Law. She is the recipient of honorary doctorates from Georgetown Law School, New York University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Bard College, among others.