Pratt in Venice is proud of the accomplishments of its art historians, both alumnae/i and faculty. Here’s a roundup of what’s new!

Natalie Draeger Peeples (PiV ‘13)

Pratt in Venice congratulates alumna Natalie Draeger Peeples on her new appointment as Arts Program Specialist at the California Arts Council!

The California Arts Council is a statewide agency strengthening arts, culture, and creative expression to cultivate a better California for all of its residents. Natalie’s role as Arts Program Specialist will be to facilitate arts grant programs, improving access to and promoting equity for all applicants and participants.

Draeger Peeples participated in Pratt in Venice in 2013, using her on-site research on the architecture of Teatro La Fenice in her History of Art & Design Master’s thesis at Pratt Institute.

Aruna D’Souza

Pratt in Venice wishes very sincere congratulations to Aruna D’Souza, an invited lecturer during the 2019 program, on her appointment as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts for the 2021–22 academic year. During the 2019 program, she led a full-day discussion at La Biennale di Venezia with our cohort. The Center, one of the leading research centers for the visual arts in the United States, has been hosted at the National Gallery of Art since 1979.

Aruna D’Souza is a scholar of modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and is a contributor to The New York Times. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Momus, Art in America, and Art Practical, among other places. Her most recent book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. She is editing a forthcoming volume for Thames and Hudson, Making It Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader. She is also editor of Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2018 (Duke University Press, 2020), and is co-curator of the retrospective of O’Grady’s work, Both/And, which opened in March 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant.

Joseph Kopta (PiV ‘07)

Joseph Kopta, an alumnus of the program who has taught the Art History of Venice course since 2015, has completed a two-year Institutional Fellowship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, Germany, funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The fellowship was in support of his Ph.D. dissertation, “Chromatic Networks: Materiality and Materialism of Middle Byzantine Gospel Lectionaries (850–1204 CE),” currently being completed at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Kopta will return to teach Art History for Pratt in Venice in the 2022 session.

Joseph Kopta is a specialist in the art and architecture of the medieval Mediterranean, with intellectual interests informed by materiality, cross-cultural interaction, and networks between Venice, Byzantium, and caliphal courts. Recent papers include “Color in Byzantine Gospel Lectionaries” at the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art & Culture; “Hair, Touch, and the Ivory Comb of Leo VI as an Agent of Imperial Order” at the Byzantine Studies Conference; and “Middle Byzantine Manuscript Pigments” at the Byzantine Materiality Conference. In 2018 he co-organized the Italian Art Society-sponsored double panel, “Venice, Materiality, and the Byzantine World” at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI. He authored the entries “Canosa di Puglia” and “Kenneth Conant” for the Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art & Architecture (Oxford University Press), and was a contributor to the Beth Shean After Antiquity project at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held professional roles at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Museum of Biblical Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Gillian Sneed, Ph.D. (PiV ‘07)

Pratt in Venice alumna Dr. Gillian Sneed has been appointed Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Art + Design at San Diego State University, beginning in Fall 2021. Sneed received her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Prior to her arrival at SDSU, she completed a postdoctoral curatorial fellowship at the Ernesto de Sousa Center for Multidisciplinary Study (CEMES) in Lisbon, Portugal. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in art history at several universities and institutions including Brooklyn College, the City College of New York, The New School for Social Research, Pace University, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Sneed’s research broadly examines 20th and 21st-century feminist art histories of the Americas, with a focus on Brazilian modern and contemporary art and transnational exchanges between Latin America and the United States. Her scholarship has addressed the intersecting genres of film, video, performance, conceptual and socially engaged art, and the gendered, sexual, and racial politics at play in these practices. At SDSU, Sneed will be teaching a range of undergraduate and graduate global art history and visual culture courses, including modern and contemporary art of the Americas.

“I work to decolonize art historical curricula by emphasizing a global scope and the contributions of historically underrepresented artists and authors,” said Sneed. “In art history courses, this involves sustained focus on global regions and cultural viewpoints not traditionally taught in the histories of Western art.

Sneed has published numerous articles and exhibition reviews and has been invited to lecture nationally and internationally. She participated in the Pratt in Venice program in 2007, and was the on-site program assistant in 2008 and 2009.