Three Women Appointed Curators at Vassar College’s Art Museum

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, has announced the appointments of three women to key curatorial positions.

Jessica D. Brier was named curator of photography. She specializes in modernist art and design with a focus on the overlapping histories of photography, print, architecture, and graphic design. Dr. Brier has previously held positions at the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and Headlands Center for the Arts, and served as curatorial assistant in photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is the author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Dr. Brier is a graduate of New York University. She holds a master’s degree in curatorial practice from the California College of the Arts and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Southern California.

Azra Dawood is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs. She is an architectural historian, curator, educator, and former architect. Her research on built environments and art practices engages the topics of cultural pluralism, religion and secularism, modernization projects, and critical perspectives on empire and philanthropy. Dr. Dawood has taught architectural history at Bard College, Pratt Institute, and the University of Houston. Dr. Dawood earned a doctorate in architectural history in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Monique D’Almeida is the Deknatel Curatorial Fellow in Japanese Works on Paper. She most recently served as the Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Earlier, she was the Freeman Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. D’Almeida is a graduate of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, where she majored in Japanese and fine arts. She earned a master’s degree from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa’s department of art and art history where she specialized in Edo period Japanese prints.