MoMA Announces The 2023-24 Cohort Of Scholars In Residence Program

The Museum of Modern Art announces the 2023–24  cohort of the MoMA Scholars in Residence, supported by the Ford Foundation: C. Ondine  Chavoya, Anne Anlin Cheng, and Sherrilyn Ifill.

The program invites three acclaimed,  inspiring thinkers to join the Museum for a one-year term to pursue independent research  that contributes to new understandings of modern and contemporary art. The current  class of MoMA Scholars will follow the inaugural group, which included Brent Hayes  Edwards, Joan Kee, and Robin Coste Lewis. Along with work on independent projects,  Edwards, Kee, and Lewis have hosted conversations, collaborated on displays, and  incubated new projects while at the Museum. 

The MoMA Scholars in Residence, supported by the Ford Foundation, includes both  scholars and makers who offer fresh perspectives on the history of modern and  contemporary art. This unique residency program, in the second year of a two-year pilot  phase, supports the work of three thought leaders with demonstrated records of  achievement to pursue research with full access to the Museum's collections, archives,  and library, and in dialogue with our staff.  

The 2023–24 cohort of scholars was selected with the guidance of a review committee  comprising external and internal members: Homi Bhabha, Huey Copeland, Crystal  Williams, Leah Dickerman, Michelle Kuo, and Lanka Tattersall. 

C. Ondine Chavoya holds a John D. Murchison Regents Professorship in Art in the  Department of Art and Art History at University of Texas at Austin. A specialist in Chicanx  and Latinx art, Chavoya is co-editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (2019). He is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. From  2002 to 2022, Chavoya was a professor of art history and Latinx studies at Williams  College, where he was a cofounder of the interdisciplinary program in Latinx studies.  Prior to Williams, Chavoya taught contemporary art and visual culture at Rhode Island  School of Design (RISD) and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.  Chavoya is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied art  history and comparative literature, and the University of Rochester (PhD, 2002).  Chavoya's curatorial projects have addressed issues of collaboration, experimentation,  social justice, and archival practices in contemporary art. In addition to exhibition focused curatorial projects, Chavoya served as the international consulting curator to the  Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) in Perú from 2018 to 2020.

Anne Anlin Cheng is a professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Program in  American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Committee on  Film Studies at Princeton University. She is a comparative race scholar whose research  focuses on the intersection between politics and aesthetics. Her work draws from literary  theory, visual culture, modernism, race and gender studies, film and architectural theory,  legal studies, and psychoanalysis. She works primarily with 20th-century American, Asian  American, and African American literatures and visual cultures. She is the author of three  books: The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Second  Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, and, most recently, Ornamentalism. Her  new book of personal essays, Ordinary Disasters, is forthcoming. Cheng is the founder  and organizer of the public conversation series Critical Encounters, which promotes  dialogue between art and theory and encourages cross-disciplinary conversations on  topics of social justice. She is one of the founders of a new experimental research  platform at Princeton called the American Studies Collaboratory—the AMS Col(LAB)— that nurtures cross-campus research affinities. Cheng received her BA in English and  creative writing at Princeton University, her master's in English and creative writing from  Stanford University, and her PhD in comparative literature from the University of  California, Berkeley. Prior to Princeton, she taught at Harvard University and the  University of California, Berkeley. 

Sherrilyn Ifill is a renowned scholar and civil rights lawyer who for a decade led the  nation's premier civil rights legal organization, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). She  is widely recognized as an expert on race, civil rights, and the Supreme Court. Since  stepping down from LDF in 2022, Ifill has served as a senior fellow at the Ford  Foundation, and is completing the manuscript for a book titled Is This America?, to be  published in 2024. Ifill is currently a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. In 2024,  Ifill will become the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights at  Howard Law School, where she will launch the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy. Ifill is a prolific scholar who served for 20 years as a professor of law at the  University of Maryland School of Law. Her 2008 book On the Courthouse Lawn:  Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 20th Century was a finalist for the  Hurston/Wright Book Award, and is credited with laying the foundation for contemporary  conversations about lynching and reparations. Ifill was appointed to President Biden's  Supreme Court Commission in 2021, and was named as one of the 100 Most Influential  People in the World by TIME magazine. In 2019, she was inducted into the American  Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the Radcliffe Medal, the Brandeis  Medal, and the Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Bar  Association. Ifill received her undergraduate degree from Vassar College and her law  degree from New York University School of Law. She is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates, including from Georgetown Law School, New York University, the  Jewish Theological Seminary, and Bard College. 

Research and scholarship on modern and contemporary art has been one of the  Museum's core commitments since its founding. Today we are building on this history to  explore and expand narratives of modern and contemporary art, to connect people  across disciplines around the study of works of art, and to share insights and research  resources through innovative, digital-forward strategies.