Current Student Research
Amjad Alnakhala
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture (deferred)
alnakhal@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Amjad Alnakhala’s research interests the intersection of art, design, and visual culture with interactive multimedia to transform digital education. His goal is to innovate and design e-learning methodologies that overcome educational disruption in emergencies to sustain learning in conflict zones like Palestine, leveraging cinematic storytelling, creative digital formats, and AI tools.
Aleesha Amjad
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
aleesha3@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Betsy Boone
Aleesha Amjad’s research focuses on the representation of animals in visual culture, with a particular interest in animals as moral characters in English fables. Beginning with Thomas Bewick’s illustrated Aesop’s Fables, they will examine how exaggerated animal figures communicate ideas about morality, human behaviour, and social values. Their research asks how these familiar creatures shape the stories and lessons they inhabit, with particular attention to animals that appear repeatedly.
Maritza Botha
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
botha1@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Maritza Botha’s research interests focus on Medieval European medical illustrations as a form of visual expression, bridging science and art. Maritza examines manuscript images and print sources to reveal how medical practice during the Medieval period was impacted by social and cultural beliefs, often carrying biases communicated through a visual language. Although the reproduction of these scientific images was intended for learning and documentation, Maritza’s work questions their veracity by investigating how intentional artistic details could both reinforce old narratives and propel human curiosity in the world of science and medicine during the Medieval period.
Ginger Carlson
Ph.D., History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
gacarlso@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Yelena Gluzman and Dr. Natalie Loveless
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.
Seoyoung Alyssa Kim
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
seoyun3@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Seoyoung (Alyssa) Kim researches contemporary three-dimensional art through the lenses of diasporic memory, material culture, and digital disembodiment. Focusing on artists who navigate transnational identity, her work explores how spatial and sensory sculptures and installations create a temporary physical, mental, and emotional refuge for immigrants negotiating constant cultural adaptation.
Justine Kohleal
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisors: 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.
Benjamin Kucher
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
bkucher@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Natalie Loveless
Benjamin Kucher researches Indigenous visual and material culture, with particular attention to museums, collections, and the relationships that gather around cultural belongings. His work considers questions of consent, sovereignty, stewardship, and knowledge production, asking what it means to collect, preserve, interpret, and display belongings that remain entangled with living communities, histories, and responsibilities. Rather than approaching cultural belongings as objects held quietly in collections, his research attends to the relationships they carry, the histories they hold, and the obligations they continue to create between people, places, institutions, and the past.
Wei Lu
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Wei Lu’s research focuses on contemporary Chinese women's art and design, examining ecofeminism in China as a way of linking gender, nature, and cultural practice. Her work traces how artists respond to ecological and urban transformation through socially engaged creative practices, expanding global conversations about gender and the environment.
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.
Olivia Pitman
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
optiman@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Olivia Pitman is a course-based master's student with a broad interest in expanding her knowledge across various areas of art history. Her primary area of interest is 19th and 20th century North American and Western European art. Throughout her undergraduate studies, she completed research projects exploring topics in Pop Art, museum studies, and the history of paint pigments.
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.
Molly Tonken
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
mtonken@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Molly Tonken is interested in post-war art in Alberta, with particular attention to sites of exchange and experimentation operating within a context of relative regional isolation. Drawing on her professional experience with private collectors and the broader Canadian secondary art market, she hopes to bring a market-informed perspective to examining how “regional” art in Alberta continues to be defined, understood, and valued, as well as what sustains or limits its wider cultural relevance.
Yi Wan
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
ywan12@ualberta.ca
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Wan Yi’s research interests lie in modern Chinese art and visual culture, with a focus on public history. His current project compares memorials to Sun Zhongshan, the founder of republican China, whose legacy is interpreted differently in Taiwan and mainland China. Yi examines the understandings of the past and its significance for the present that institutions under different political systems across the Taiwan Strait seek to convey through memorial architecture, exhibits, and curatorial design.
Lucia Xun Wang
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: 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 Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Qi Zhang’s doctoral research examines representations of motherhood and mother-child relationships in Chinese visual culture during the 1970s and 1980s, with a particular focus on posters, paintings, and photography. Her project considers the post-Mao transition and the emergence of new representations of women, children, and family life after the Cultural Revolution. More broadly, her research explores how visual culture participated in changing ideas of gender, motherhood, and social life in late socialist and early reform-era China.