Adri Kácsor is a PhD student at the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. Adri is primarily interested in twentieth-century communist art in Europe and the Soviet Union. Her dissertation project centers on the entangled relationship between nationalism and internationalism in the work of the Hungarian communist artists, who lived in exile in the Soviet Union following the collapse of the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik regime in 1919. Prior to her doctoral studies at Northwestern, Adri studied journalism and history in Budapest, Hungary, earning degrees at the Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University.

Barbora Bartunkova is a third-year Ph.D. student in the History of Art Department at Yale University. She explores how art and visual culture are imbricated in the sociopolitical and historical fabric of Europe, from the nineteenth century to the present. Her research interests include French modernity, interwar avant-gardes, and the relationship between art and politics during the Cold War. Barbora holds an M.A. with Distinction in the History of Art from University College London, where she also completed her undergraduate degree in French with Film Studies. As part of this program she spent a year at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. During her studies in London, she worked as a curatorial volunteer at the Royal Academy of Arts and at Annely Juda Fine Art, a leading contemporary art gallery. She further served as a curatorial assistant at the Lobkowicz Collections and as a rights and reproductions coordinator at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. At Yale, Barbora has been a graduate organizer of the Modernist Forum, a platform hosting events in the History of Art Department that introduce the Yale community to the work of scholars of modern and contemporary art, as well as curators, artists, and other art practitioners.

Bay ByrneSim is a first year Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, she wrote a thesis about the transnational anti-fascist photomontages of a Mexican communist artists’ collective during the 1930s. She spent the last year researching the exile of John Heartfield, traveling with the support of the H. Allen Brooks Fellowship from Dartmouth College. She hopes to continue working on international leftist organizations during the interwar period.

Deirdre Smith is a doctoral candidate in the department of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research interests include the art of the 1970s in Europe and the United States, the role of the artist in society, and labor. Her dissertation, “Umjetnik radi: Stilinović and Trbuljak on Art, Work and Life” juxtaposes and analyzes the careers of two key figures of Yugoslav New Art Practice, Mladen Stilinović and Goran Trbuljak, within a broader history of the art world of former Yugoslavia and the city of Zagreb. Ms. Smith earned a master’s degree from George Washington University where her thesis focused on Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings and the experiences of LeWitt’s assistants. She has held internships at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Joseph Henry is a PhD student in the art history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research considers the intersection of artistic production and modes of labor in Euro-American modernity, with emphases on painting and performance and a historical focus on the visual cultures of pre- and inter-war Germany. He has presented research at the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum and published with venues including Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Performa Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Inquiry. He is currently a 2017-18 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and teaches art history at Brooklyn College.

Kata Krasznahorkai is a Berlin-based art historian and curator working as a researcher at the University of Zürich in the ERC-research project Performance Art in Eastern Europe (1950-1990). History and Theory. Krasznahorkai studied art history in Budapest, Berlin, Vienna and Hamburg and defended her PhD 2015 at the University of Hamburg on “Walter De Maria´s Lightning Field between image and technical history“. She was a curator at the Ludwig Museum Budapest (1996-2003) and the project director at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (2010-2016). She was the curator of the 3-years- project series “Critique and Crisis. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité reconsidered” in cooperation with the Council of Europe and the German Historical Museum Berlin and she launched a performance program. Krasznahorkai is also an expert for the rescaling of the Council of Europe`s art exhibitions and the chairwomen of the Berlin-based organisation “Critique&Culture”.

Nicoletta Rousseva is an art historian and PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her dissertation, provisionally titled Bad Comrades: Towards an Alternative History of Art after Socialism, examines contemporary film and performance art in the former Yugoslavia, particularly its response to the confluence of democracy, capitalism, and far-right politics in the region after 1989. She has presented research at the College Art Association’s annual conference, the Association for Art History’s annual conference, the University of Chicago, and elsewhere. Her writing is featured in Art Journal and The Brooklyn Rail, with forthcoming work in Plot and There There. In addition to art in Eastern Europe, Nicoletta’s interests include intellectual histories of socialism and liberalism in the twentieth century, bureaucracy, and critical theory, particularly that of the Frankfurt School.

Patricia Pfeifer is a Research assistant, lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. She studied Art History, Slavic studies and Cultural
Studies in Bamberg, Paris and Munich. After the Completion of her Master thesis on
Czechoslovak New Wave Cinema she worked as a Research assistant at the Institute for Art
History at the Ludwig-Maximilians- University Munich and was Fellow at the Graduate
School for East and South East European Studies in Munich and Regensburg. Her PhD-
project approaches from an interdisciplinary perspective aesthetic strategies of interval and in-betweenness in contemporary films and visual art works from East Central Europe. It deals
with the question of how the process of political and social transformation in the post-
communist countries is being visualised by a young generation of artists and filmmakers. Her
articles on Hungarian films, Romanian and (post-)Yugoslav cinema have been published in
Swiss film journals, in Studies in Eastern European Cinema and Studies in Contemporary
History.

Patricia Pfeifer is a Research assistant, lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. She studied Art History, Slavic studies and Cultural
Studies in Bamberg, Paris and Munich. After the Completion of her Master thesis on
Czechoslovak New Wave Cinema she worked as a Research assistant at the Institute for Art
History at the Ludwig-Maximilians- University Munich and was Fellow at the Graduate
School for East and South East European Studies in Munich and Regensburg. Her PhD-
project approaches from an interdisciplinary perspective aesthetic strategies of interval and in-betweenness in contemporary films and visual art works from East Central Europe. It deals
with the question of how the process of political and social transformation in the post-
communist countries is being visualised by a young generation of artists and filmmakers. Her
articles on Hungarian films, Romanian and (post-)Yugoslav cinema have been published in
Swiss film journals, in Studies in Eastern European Cinema and Studies in Contemporary
History.

Wiktor Komorowski is a third-year History of Art PhD student at the Courtauld Institute of
Art, London. He received his BA degree in History of Art and Portuguese from the
University of Manchester and his MA degree in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of
Art, London. His research focuses on the exhibitions of prints in Eastern Europe and the
relationship between the art world and the Cold War politics. He is particularly interested in
the curatorial strategies developed to negotiate power split in the authoritarian countries.
Wiktor’s project is supervised by Dr Klara Kemp-Welch and is supported by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council, UK. Wiktor has recently curated an exhibition of Polish
contemporary art at the POSK Gallery in London titled Migrant’s Dream and acted as a
consultant appointed by the Ben Uri Gallery, London for the exhibition titled Art Out of
the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain.