New Art faculty: Mariola Alvarez and Melissa Walt

The Art Department is thrilled to welcome two new faculty members in September 2015.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art for 2015-2017, Mariola V. Alvarez will teach new courses at Colby on global contemporary art history and new media arts. Her research explores modern and contemporary Latin American art history and includes a focus on modernism in Brazil. After receiving her doctoral degree from the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Alvarez held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rice University and taught at Washington College in Maryland.

A historian of modern and contemporary Chinese art, Melissa Walt has been appointed Faculty Fellow in Art for 2015-2016, while Professor Ankeney Weitz is on sabbatical. Her research concentrates on Chinese expatriate artists, although her interests span topics throughout East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, including the Chinese Cultural Revolution, ceramic traditions, Buddhism, sacred and secular architecture, clothing and fashion, and cinema. Dr. Walt earned her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, and has graduate degrees from Yale University and the University of Washington. She is currently co-curating No Limits: The Art of Zao Wou-ki with Ankeney Weitz for the Colby College Museum of Art.