Jessamine Batario Named Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement
The Colby College Museum of Art is thrilled to announce the appointment of Jessamine Batario as Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement.
Since August 2019, Jessamine has served as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Artistic and Scholarly Engagement and Programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art, where she has led innovative work to engage Colby students and faculty in collaborative scholarly and creative projects with Lunder Institute visiting artists and research fellows, including Maya Lin.
As Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement, she will advance the teaching mission of the museum by serving as a liaison to Colby’s academic community, developing pedagogy, and leading programmatic strategy for supporting student and faculty engagement with the museum’s collections and exhibitions as well as with artists, scholars and other creative researchers who are involved with the museum through its Lunder Institute for American Art. In addition to collaborating with staff, faculty, students, and other partners to design visits, course collaborations, and workshops, Jessamine will also develop resources and contribute to digital assets and platforms that support interdisciplinary teaching and contribute to research, program development, collecting, and interpretive practices across the museum.
Jessamine’s research interests include modern and contemporary art, and the historiography of art history. She earned her PhD in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, where her dissertation project, “Contemporary Transgressions: the Byzantine-Modern Connection,” evaluated the aesthetic, critical, and historical interplay between Byzantine and modern art. This project was supported by fellowships and grants from the Dedalus Foundation, Getty Research Institute, and the Vivian L. Smith Foundation at the Menil Collection in Houston. Jessamine’s research has appeared in the peer-reviewed publications, Journal of Art Historiography and Different Visions. She also writes regularly for The Brooklyn Rail, where she was invited as a Guest Critic. In 2020, she co-founded Kababayan: Filipinx American Art History Working Group with Dr. Pearlie Rose Baluyut and Dr. Lalaine Bangilan Little.