Museum interns after coffee with Bill Eiland in spring 2019.
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The Georgia Museum of Art enriches the education of many students at the University of Georgia. Each semester the museum offers internship and work-study opportunities to provide students with unique and behind-the-scenes experiences of museum life. The following students have worked with us between summer 2020 to spring 2021. Some have graduated or will be reaching that milestone in a few days, while others will return. We’re incredibly grateful for their resilience and hard work during such a challenging year.
Claire Bellanger
Claire showed herself to be highly reliable, resourceful and efficient throughout her fall 2020 internship. Her primary project was to assist with the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection gallery of European and American impressionism. She conducted extensive secondary research, provided valuable organizational assistance and wrote drafts for revised or entirely rewritten labels for the gallery. True to her ambitious personality and desire to grow, Claire went above the standard expectations for our internship program, assigning herself an independent research paper on American impressionism, which she completed on top of her regular internship duties and class commitments. I am proud to say that Claire will continue her art historical and museum career this fall as a master’s student at Boston University. – Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
Keyonna Brannam
This is the second year we’ve been lucky enough to have Keyonna on our public relations team. I always appreciate how thoughtfully and thoroughly she approaches her writing of press releases and blogs, digging into the material and trying to find a take on it that is both novel and authentic. She is a MailChimp wizard and largely responsible for the listing of all the museum’s events (virtual and in-person) on various calendaring platforms. – Hillary Brown
Marilena Congi
Museum interns are hardworking and capable and this was especially true this year as we learned to live with the pandemic, and certainly applies to Marilena. Two major projects she took on included reimagining a traveling teacher resource to go along with Japanese ukiyo-e prints from the permanent collection, developing gallery and art activities to go along with it and helping research and develop content for this semester’s Homeschool Day(opens in new tab). Marilena also helped with audiovisual support for Zoom programs and meticulously assembled “to-go” art kits. She was a joy to work with, always thoughtful and perceptive, and helped the education department develop great new content. – Sage Kincaid
Kelli Couch
Kelli interned in the education department fall semester 2020. It was a busy, interesting semester as the education department worked to continue virtual programming in the new school year. Kelli helped make many, many art kits to go along with the museum’s newly virtual school tours(opens in new tab). One day she cut hundreds of paper straws for a science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) bee-hotel project that was being packed into kits for 160 third graders! Despite the blisters from all that cutting (so sorry!!), Kelli kept a positive attitude and even returned to help pack those hundreds of straws into the kits. She also helped create an amazing soap carving Art at Home project(opens in new tab) for Instagram and Facebook. She’s a great team player, and I feel so appreciative she could roll with all the art activity ideas and prep. – Emily Hogrefe-Ribeiro
Noah Dasinger
Noah has been a great addition to our department of European art. He is a rigorous researcher and a dedicated student, not to mention a joy to work with! – Nelda Damiano
Chase Dean
Chase Dean is a recent University of Georgia graduate (in finance!), who was introduced to us through the exhibition “Modern Living: Giò Ponti and the 20th-Century Aesthetics of Design(opens in new tab).” Since then, he has taken a passionate interest in Georgia material culture, participating in most programs at the Green Center and developing remarkable connoisseurship. He has already made important discoveries in Georgia decorative arts and was a lender to the exhibition “Material Georgia(opens in new tab).” Chase is a brilliant example of how students with different academic backgrounds and career aims can benefit from life enrichment with the humanities and the museum in particular. Chase spent much of this fall semester assisting with research projects. – Dale Couch
Emma Emery
Emma came into her publications internship with a burning enthusiasm for everything she does, whether writing (she’s contributed many a blog post) or editing (I appreciate her commitment to helping authors be as clear as possible in their communication as she asks copious questions in the margins of the documents she edits). She is speedy, detail-oriented and passionate about her work. – Hillary Brown
Nekabari Ereba
Calm, steady and committed to her work, Nekabari interned in PR for the whole year, and I wish we could have her for longer, but she’s graduating. When she wrote the press release for Dr. Kirin’s exhibition of Coptic art(opens in new tab), she also managed to snag some great media placements through direct pitching to journalists, and she made sure to come see the show the night it opened. She’s found a real love of museum work, and I hope she continues in the field, which needs more folks like her. She is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in advertising from UGA this semester! – Hillary Brown
Charlotte Gaillet
Charlotte Gaillet is a second-year master’s candidate in American art history at UGA, having received a bachelor’s degree in art history and political science from UGA in 2019. Her current research interests intersect at cultural history and art, culminating in her thesis research topic, which examines the impact of World War I on California-based artist Imogen Cunningham. She currently serves as an intern at the museum, where she works with decorative arts and material culture. She is also a graduate assistant at the Lamar Dodd School of Art and serves as president of its Association of Graduate Art Students. She is an accepted participant for the 2021 Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts Summer Institute program(opens in new tab), where she will travel and research decorative arts within the Chesapeake Bay area, and she read a paper at the 2020 Green Symposium interpreting a document recording landscape flowers in use in Savannah in the 19th century. Charlotte has spent the past two semesters assisting with organization and research with Green Center topics. – Dale Couch
Meghan Gerig
Meghan Gerig has had the hardest job in the museum perhaps: as an intern for the director, she has had to be independent, reliable and inventive. She has been all of those things as well as intelligent, self-starting and determined. In other words, I have been extraordinarily pleased with her work for me, and I am wishing her well in graduate school and in her career, which I really hope will be in the museum industry. Hats off to Meghan, a future museum director? – Bill Eiland
Jean Hong
Jean was our first graphic design intern in an age, and she’s been incredibly helpful! She’s designed the majority of our Art at Home projects(opens in new tab) over the past year, proving that she can handle a steady flow of work with a serious deadline and be attentive to brand guidelines. She’s graduating from the Lamar Dodd School of Art this semester, and we’ll really miss her! – Hillary Brown
Katie Landers
Katie has interned with us since the fall, and has been an asset to the education department in so many ways. She was gracious and flexible in the fall as we all figured out how to manage hybrid virtual/in-person internships. A true team player, Katie pitched in to help with many different projects: assisting with tech troubleshooting, providing support for our virtual programs and helping assemble literally thousands of art kits for kids and families. She’s a fantastic writer, and became our go-to person for researching and writing “Close Looking” and “Art at Home” posts for various online and social media platforms. Katie is very organized, dependable and creative, and cares deeply about making art and museums accessible and equitable for all. She has taken a lead role in an ongoing project we’re doing with an English class working on the Prison Writing Project, acting as liaison between the course instructor and the museum, helping schedule class visits and preparing art materials to be used in the Common Good Atlanta(opens in new tab)’s incarcerated educational programs. I know Katie will bring incredible dedication, enthusiasm and care to whatever career path she ends up choosing. – Callan Steinmann
Emma McMorran
Exceptionally organized and always dependable, Emma came to the museum in fall 2020 with the reputation of a solid researcher, as both an honors scholar and summer fellow at UGA’sCenter for Undergraduate Research Opportunities. She exceeded my expectations. In the fall, Emma produced thorough and well-synthesized dossiers on the 20 artists featured in my upcoming exhibition on Native American printmaking. This spring, for her capstone project through the honors program, she built up the curatorial files of the new Shlesinger Collection(opens in new tab) and crafted thoughtful labels and social media content for our summer exhibition celebrating the Shlesinger gift. I am proud to say that Emma will continue her art historical and museum career this fall as a master’s student at Georgetown University. – Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
Rebecca Moon
Rebecca, who is graduating with her bachelor’s degree in English from UGA this semester, deserves special kudos for her work on copyright research. The project “Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism”(opens in new tab) was a tough one, with many artists who had died after the cut-off for being clear of copyright but not represented by the big firms like Artists Rights Society. She spent hours googling and helped me track down galleries, artists’ estates and family members, ensuring that we did more than due diligence on the book. – Hillary Brown
Anna Morelock
We only got to have Anna for one semester as a publications intern before she graduated, but she accomplished so much in her time here, reading the text of books, writing excellent blog posts and Facet articles and even dipping a toe into marketing the museum’s publications. She currently works for Insight Global, a staffing company in Atlanta, after graduating in December 2020 from UGA with a bachelor’s degree in English. – Hillary Brown
Santana Nash
Santana became my first virtual intern and worked during the fall 2020 semester. We met largely over Zoom and she was helpful in researching artists both in the collection and ones under consideration for the collection. She even created an original blog and digital presentation(opens in new tab) of the late photographer William Anderson, Jr. I was informed by her advisor, professor Janice Simon, that she has been accepted into Georgia State University’s graduate program to further her study of art history and an internship at the High Museum of Art. – Shawnya L. Harris
