Wesleyan graduates Maya Hayda ‘21, Rachel Rosin ‘19, Riley Richards ‘21 and Mim Pomerantz ‘23 recently joined us for a Career Panel discussion, moderated by members of the Art History Majors Committee; Bailey Chapin ’24 and Emma Flaherty ’24.
This was a unique and exciting opportunity for students to hear from and speak with Alumni who are professionals in today’s art history field!
Maya Hayda ‘21 is a curator, writer, and art historian. She has worked with Artists Space, Canal Projects, PS122 Gallery, and Frappant, and has written for The Wattis Institute, LA Review of Books, FLAT Journal, Public Parking, and The Drawing Center. Residencies include Grupo de Investigación en Arte y Política (GIAP) and Fabrica. Her research interests are rooted in questions of materiality, analogy, poetics, and the confluences of natural and built environments across Eastern Europe and the Global South. Her practice examines and activates art as an interdisciplinary framework that exposes, engages, and catalyzes relations between organisms, matter, media, and broader ecologies. Her ongoing projects are interested in geopoetics, extraction, and extractivism, seeking to engage with artistic practices that recalibrate and undermine these cycles with alternative possibilities of worlding, being, and relating. Since 2023, she has been a member of the curatorial group and research laboratory, Collective Rewilding. She holds a degree in Art History and English from Wesleyan University (2021) and will begin her Ph.D. in Art History at Princeton University in Fall 2024.
Riley Richards ’21 is the Tiffany & Co. Foundation Intern in American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In May 2023 she received an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She studies the history of craft in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research has particularly focused on makers in the American South, ranging from the everyday use and production of utilitarian ceramics in Tennessee to the influence of regional identity in the Arts and Crafts Movement in America. At the Met she supports the five American Decorative Arts curators on a variety of projects. Most notably, she is working on the upcoming (June 2024) exhibition Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. which examines the innovative silver produced at Tiffany & Co. in the late nineteenth century and the collected objects which influenced their design.
Rachel Rosin ’19 is Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings & Prints and Curatorial Affairs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She works closely on MoMA’s rotating fourth floor collection galleries, which span the 1940s through the 70s. Before this, Rachel worked at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, The Jewish Museum, New York, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among other art institutions. In 2022, she received her MA with Distinction in the History of Art from University College London. In 2019, she graduated with a BA with High Honors and Phi Beta Kappa in Art History and English from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Mim Pomerantz ‘23 is currently enrolled in a M.A. program in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford, UK, focusing on the history of photography and Surrealism. At Wesleyan, she double majored in Art History and Studio Art with a concentration in Photography.
A sincere thank you to our Art History Alumni for contributing to this informative career panel discussion and providing invaluable insight and guidance to our students!