Current Student Research
Isha Amjad
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Betsy Boone
Ginger Carlson
Ph.D., History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
gacarlso@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Yelena Glutzman
Ginger Carlson’s research considers curatorial practice through a disability justice lens. Using a research-creation process, she explores creative access as liberatory curatorial methodology. Her scholarship is situated at the intersections of crip aesthetics, critical disability studies, and institutional critique. Carlson’s work is informed by lived experience of disability and their role as a researcher with the University of Alberta’s Smartwear Revolution project.
Moriah Crocker
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual CultureAdvisors: Dr. Erin Sutherland and Dr. Natalie Loveless
Moriah Crocker’s research is focused on craft and labour, with a special interest in artists who highlight both the care involved in creating art, and the everyday objects that surround us. Moriah uses time and documentation to make visible the previously unseen labour of crafting. Her own beadwork practice investigates how the perception and value of objects change, and are up for negotiation as the labour of the artist becomes focal. She is currently a SSHRC Master’s Fellow.
Skye Haggerty
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual CultureAdvisors: Dr. Betsy Boone and Dr. Natalie Loveless
Skye Haggerty’s research interests are Indigenous material cultures, visual representations of land and “nature,” and needleworking. Their current work focuses on counter-beading as a creative act of resistance that complicates and visually disrupts the linear narratives of colonial borders and maps. Research-creation and methodologies emphasizing a “knowing-through-doing” perspective are central to their working method, as are principles of reciprocity in learning.
Niloufar Jamali
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
njamali1@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Lianne McTavish
Niloufar Jamali’s research focuses on the representation of the body, memory, and resistance in visual culture, with a particular interest in women, protest art, and contemporary Iran. Drawing from her background in painting and illustration, she explores how images communicate grief, trauma, resilience, and collective experience across political and historical contexts. Her current work examines embodiment and visual storytelling in relation to art and protest imagery.
Justine Kohleal
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual CultureAdvisors: Dr. Natalie Loveless and Dr. Sheena Wilson
Justine Kohleal’s doctoral research specializes in theories and practices related to contemporary art, curatorial and museum studies, and the energy humanities to rethink post-industrial cultural infrastructure. Focusing on contemporary art galleries housed in former factories and power plants, this interdisciplinary work examines how these institutions remain entangled in settler colonial histories, fossil fuel imaginaries, and extractive labour systems despite being framed as sites of cultural renewal. The project introduces the concept of “factory logics” to describe how patterns of extraction, hierarchy, and precarity persist within these spaces; and through case studies and a site-responsive analysis of Edmonton’s Rossdale Power Plant, it develops an unsettled curatorial methodology that reconceptualizes the post-industrial, contemporary art institution as part of a nested, metabolic system. Kohleal is currently a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.
Wei Lu
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual CultureAdvisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Wei Lu’s research focuses on contemporary Chinese women’s art and design, with an emphasis on ecofeminism, material culture, and socially engaged creative practices. Her work examines how artists navigate intersections of feminism, ecological thinking, and urban transformation, exploring how culturally-specific artistic practices can expand global conversations about gender, ecology, and material agency. She is currently a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.
Kayla Matthew
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
kaylamae@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Lianne McTavish
Kayla Matthew studies paintings, sketches, and prints that are housed in rural Alberta museums. Kayla explores historical archives to determine how these artworks can relate to contemporary museum visitors’ varied identities. This allows her to curate new displays and interpretive texts that are accessible and aid in further decolonizing museum spaces.
Avelina Rathbone
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual CultureAdvisor: Dr. Natalie Loveless
Sam Rittwage Scott
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
rittwage@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Walter Davis
Sam Rittwage Scott’s research is centered on the cultural interchange and development of Japanese art within Canada, focusing on the inheritance and preservation of Japanese pre-modern visual phenomena after World War II. He considers the cultural loss that was faced during the Japanese internment in Alberta, and the post war efforts of Japanese communities to restore and retain Japanese visual identity.
Lucia Xun Wang
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual CultureAdvisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Lucia Xun Wang researches contemporary calligraphy in the context of performance art. She examines how artists transform the theoretical mind-body relationship into physical action and use nontraditional media to question conventions of legibility, gender, and cultural authority. Her work highlights how material, gesture, and the body contribute to redefining calligraphy while preserving its cultural significance.
Qi Zhang
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual CultureAdvisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Qi Zhang’s dissertation reconstructs the Chinese Independent Art Association by uncovering overlooked Guangzhou archives and Zhao Shou’s lifelong surrealist oeuvre. It traces how Chinese students returning from Japan adopted European Surrealism, highlighting regional agency and challenging centre-periphery narratives of modernism. The project emphasises cross-cultural exchange and new interpretations through deep archival research.