A Trio of Women Scholars Who Have Been Appointed to Endowed Positions at University Art Museums

Vanja V. Malloy has been appointed as the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. She will lead the university’s fine arts museum and its exhibitions, public and arts education programs, and student and faculty collaborations. Dr. Malloy joins the Smart Museum from the Syracuse University Art Museum, where she was appointed director and chief curator in 2019. Prior to her tenure at Syracuse, Malloy spent five years as a curator at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

Dr. Malloy is a graduate of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She holds a master’s degree in American fine and decorative arts from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York City and a Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London.

The Harvard Art Museums have appointed Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım as the new Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art. She was the Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art at the Brooklyn Museum, in New York. From 2013 to 2017, Dr. Yoltar-Yildirim was the assistant curator for Islamic and later Indian art at Harvard.

Dr. Yoltar-Yıldırım received a bachelor’s degree in art history and archaeology at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Türkiye. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Silvia Forni was appointed the Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum in the School of the Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, effective December 1. She was senior curator of global Africa and deputy vice president of the department of art and culture for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She was also an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto

Dr. Forni received a bachelor’s in philosophy and a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Turin in Italy. She also holds a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from Indiana University.