Smarthistory Staff

Haniwa, Kofun Period, Japan

Leadership

Dr. Beth Harris is co-founder and executive director of Smarthistory. Previously, she was dean of art and history at Khan Academy and director of digital learning at The Museum of Modern Art. Before joining MoMA, Beth was Associate Professor of art history and director of distance learning at the Fashion Institute of Technology where she taught both online and in the classroom. She has co-authored, with Dr. Steven Zucker, numerous articles on the future of education and the future of museums, and is the editor of Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (2005). She received her Master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and her doctorate in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Dr. Steven Zucker is co-founder and executive director of Smarthistory. Previously, Steven was dean of art and history at Khan Academy. He was chair of history of art and design at Pratt Institute where he strengthened enrollment and led renewal of curriculum across the Institute. Previously, he was dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, and chair of art history. He has taught at The School of Visual Arts, Hunter College, and at The Museum of Modern Art. Dr. Zucker is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has co-authored, with Dr. Beth Harris, numerous articles on the future of education and the future of museums. Dr. Zucker received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

UX Strategist and Project Lead

Kayla McCarthy has her hands in just about every aspect of Smarthistory, focusing on user experience and operational strategy. At Indiana University, where she graduated with a B.A. in American Studies, she also had her hands in many areas, from pioneering a pop-up exhibit for the University’s bicentennial, to writing about the nostalgia of Stranger Things. It was also at Indiana University where her curiosity about digital tools and their potential to democratize knowledge was sparked, which built on a longer love of how to connect real people with big ideas in that humbling, expansive process of learning and exchange. In addition to Smarthistory, Kayla has worked with the Chicago History Museum’s Chicago 00 Project, where she had a dynamic role in realizing a virtual reality experience of the 1893 World’s Fair.

Registrar for Digital Content and Initiatives

Julia Campbell is responsible for the documentation, coordination, and care of essays, videos, the Reframing Art History textbook, and special projects. She oversees the preservation and organization of the digital content library, manages Smarthistory staff members, and acts as a liaison with Smarthistory’s scholarly community. Julia graduated from Pepperdine University with a B.A. in art history and a minor in digital humanities. Her undergraduate thesis “Procession, Feast, and Ceremony: Asco’s Celebration of Subversion” explores the work of Asco, a Chicano artist group active in the 1970s and 1980s. Previously, Julia interned with the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and was a member of the inaugural cohort of the AllPaper Seminar at the Benton Museum of Art.

Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Joseph Ugoretz is Chief Technology Officer at Smarthistory, where he helps guide the organization’s digital infrastructure and strategic use of technology in service of art history education. In this role, he supports Smarthistory’s commitment to open educational resources and ensures that its platforms remain accessible, reliable, and innovative for learners around the world. Before joining Smarthistory, Joseph had a long career in higher education, serving most recently as Senior Associate Dean and Chief Academic Officer at Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York. His work there centered on faculty development, online learning, and fostering interdisciplinary connections across the arts, sciences, and humanities. Now retired from his academic career, Joe continues to lend his expertise in digital strategy and learning technologies to Smarthistory, combining a passion for art, education, and accessible design with decades of leadership experience.

Chief Financial Officer

Michael Burdick oversees all things financial at Smarthistory as well as all compliance related issues. He has spent the majority of his career supporting education organizations with their financial and operational needs. Most recently he consulted for small education organizations under the banner of Ops For Good, which provided back office services for new and small nonprofit organizations. He created Ops for Good to address the challenges and inefficiencies small nonprofits face building in-house operations, often without in-house operations expertise. His passion for the work started when he was CFO at NewSchools Venture Fund and spent a good portion of his time advising new grantees through the process of setting up their organizations and infrastructure building.

Visiting scholar in the visual cultures of Byzantium and the Islamic world

Dr. Ariel Fein is a historian specializing in the visual cultures of Byzantium and the Islamic world, with a particular focus on intercultural and interreligious relationships across the Mediterranean and Africa. After receiving her PhD from Yale University, she held an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Smarthistory and a membership in medieval studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her research has also been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bard Graduate Center, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture.

Samuel H. Kress Foundation Senior Fellow

Dr. Letha Ch’ien is an art historian and art critic. She writes widely on visual art for a variety of publications. A specialist in early modern European art, she served as a tenured associate professor of art history at Sonoma State University until 2025. Her research and writing have been supported by the NEH, Mellon, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Mabelle McLeod Lewis, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and Fulbright. Dr. Ch’ien received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Macaulay Family Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Courtney Lesoon is a historian of Islamic art, architecture, and urbanism. She earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her doctoral work was supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays program and the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Foundation. Her research on the early and medieval Islamic world engages closely with primary sources to address Islamic visual and built culture from an Islamic perspective. As a pedagogue, Courtney is interested in how the study of the premodern and non-Western world encourages students to become more flexible and agile thinkers.

Past Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows

Dr. Monica Bulger is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia, where she specialized in the material culture of the Eastern Mediterranean. Her current research focuses on artistic innovations and experiences of viewing in Protoarchaic and Archaic Greece. She has served as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Smarthistory and the Stavros Niarchos Fellow in Classical Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has excavated in Cyprus and Greece.

Dr. Ariel Fein studies the medieval visual cultures of Byzantium and the Islamic world. Her research focuses on intercultural artistic connections across the frontier zones of the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular interest in the arts of Norman Sicily and the Arab-Christian communities of medieval Egypt and Ifriqiya. Ariel is currently at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Dr. Evan Freeman is Contributing Editor for Byzantine art and co-editor of the Smarthistory Guide to Byzantine Art with Anne McClanan. He is Assistant Professor and Hellenic Canadian Congress of BC Chair in Hellenic Studies in the Department of Global Humanities and at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University, he held an Andrew W. Mellow postdoctoral fellowship at Smarthistory and an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Regensburg. He co-edited Byzantine Materiality (De Gruyter) with Roland Betancourt.

Dr. Kristen Laciste received her MA and PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and specializes in art and visual culture from West and Central Africa. In her scholarship, she examines African fashion practices and subcultures created or influenced by colonialism during the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the fashion subculture, the Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons (La SAPE) in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. In addition, she studies photography in Africa, from its introduction and utilization by Europeans to justify their colonial intervention, to its usage by African artists in the wake of independence to the present, and its circulation in American and European news media.

Dr. Arathi Menon earned her degree in art history and archaeology from Columbia University. She specializes in the art histories of South Asia, with a focus on the material culture of the premodern Indian Ocean world. Menon’s current book project examines the medieval art and architecture of the churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples of Malabar, in southwestern India. Menon’s graduate work and dissertation research was supported by the Steven Kossak Fellowship in Indian art, the Riggio Fellowship in Art History, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She was previously Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Smarthistory — The Center for Public Art History and co-editor of the Bulletin 79 (Fall 2020) for the American Council of Southern Asian Art. Menon has taught at Columbia University and at Scripps College of the Claremont Colleges.

Production Coordinator

Elliot Krasnopoler edits photography, works with metadata, stages essays, and edits video for Smarthistory. Elliot is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Bryn Mawr College, focusing on the intersections of art and natural history. He earned his B.F.A. from Rochester Institute of Technology and an M.A. in the History of Art from Williams College. His dissertation, “What the Earth Remembers: Landscape and Materiality in Contemporary Art,” examines how artists’ material engagement with land and place unearths new understandings of American history. Elliot has published in History of Photography and the edited volume Breaking the Silence: Methods of Writing Art History. He was the 2021–22 George Gurney Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Content Refresh Editors

Suzie Oppenheimer and JooHee Kim refresh Smarthistory’s oldest essays by adding new high-res images, customized maps, links, hover popups, additional resources, and more.

Suzie Oppenheimer specializes in 19th and 20th century art and visual culture of the hemispheric Americas. Her dissertation focuses on waterscapes, particularly the role of oceanic imagery in shaping conceptions of race, modernity, and extraction across visual art, “new” technologies, and spectacle. She is adjunct lecturer of art history at various colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY). Previously, she was Curatorial Associate of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and Curatorial Project Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She earned her M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art and is a current Ph.D. student at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

JooHee Kim specializes in modern and contemporary American art with a focus on the experiences of the Asian diaspora, and immigrants in relation to performance and technology. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, where her interest in museum history and theories flourished, leading her to pursue a second master’s degree in museum studies at New York University. During her time at NYU, JooHee worked with artist Joan Jonas and scholars to compile comprehensive information about Jonas’s work in an online database (Joan Jonas Knowledge Base), benefiting future curators, conservators, and researchers. She also interned at the Media and Performance Art Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. JooHee is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park.