Maliha Ahmed
We only had the pleasure of working with Maliha for one semester, but her time at the museum was well spent! She helped with many projects including greeting families for Family Day, prepping art materials for kits and organizing department records. In everything she did, Maliha brought a bright enthusiasm for working with people and was a delight to spend time with. She is personable, dedicated and hard-working. We are excited to see where her interests lead her next. – Sage Kincaid
Natalia Blooming
Natalia was a summer 2021 intern for the education department who worked on the museum’s Art Adventures program. She helped lead virtual and in-person tours and assisted with creating education content for the museum’s social media. Natalia worked very hard to create engaging tour stops as part of Art Adventures’ in-person program, and her curiosity about art education, gallery teaching and art objects really shone in all her contributions to the museum’s programming last summer. Natalia always found a way to break down the complicated theoretical or historical contexts about works of art to make them accessible to everyone! I appreciated her thoughtful ideas for improving the Art Adventures program, her focus when learning to teach virtually and in-person and her great music recommendations. I am excited to see where her passion for art education takes her next! – Emily Hogrefe-Ribeiro
Keyonna Brannam
This is the third year we’ve been lucky enough to have Keyonna as a public relations intern, and I’m already thinking ahead to her graduation in the fall of 2022 with trepidation. What will we do without her? By now, I can give Keyonna the most minimal instructions, and she’ll sail through any task with ease. She writes smart and capable press releases and blog posts. She keeps track of all the media calendars on which we list the museum’s events and exhibitions. She catches mistakes and makes updates without being asked. She pulls press clippings, she writes wonderful Daily Inspiration posts for Instagram, she scanned and organized every awards certificate we could find from the past 30 years, and she does all of this while pursuing a demanding degree in animal science. – Hillary Brown
Danielle Davis (graduating this week with a degree in English)
Danielle has been interning in public relations since last semester, and she’s been such a calm, focused and steady presence, quick to pick up on details and incredibly diligent. She’s been responsible for adding hundreds of ticketed events to the website, checking every necessary box, but she’s also written engaging press releases and blog posts, talking with curators and figuring out what might make a journalist pick up a release a second time. She’s created media calendars in Mailchimp and pulled media clips to make impressive press packets. None of these are things that the English department trains its students to do, so extra kudos to a humanities student doing a new kind of heavy lifting. – Hillary Brown
Melissa DePierro
The registrars’ department was grateful to have Melissa working with us this semester. She is kind and engaging, she picks up on new tasks quickly and efficiently, and she impressed us all by getting the base information for a collection of over 3,000 photographs into our collections database and still having time to rehouse over 1,200 photographs and take images of a few hundred. Some serious hyper focus skills. She will be taking the summer off, but we are looking forward to having her back next fall! – Amber Barnhardt
Olivia Eubanks
Olivia worked with the education department during summer 2021. She assisted with the museum’s summer program, Art Adventures. As part of the Art Adventures program, she helped lead virtual and in-person tours and developed fun tour stops for the in-person experience. Olivia was great at asking close looking questions and meeting the enthusiasm of the students on tours. She was able to quickly adapt to teaching on Zoom and in-person because of her flexibility and willingness to jump right in and try something new! One of my favorite memories of that summer was Olivia’s commitment to creating a paper sculpture art project for the museum’s Art at Home program. She brought supplies with her on vacation and worked hard, despite the humidity of her vacation locale wreaking havoc on the paper’s sculptural integrity, to come up with a fun 3D activity! I know Olivia will bring this tenacity and enthusiasm to any museum work she does in the future! – Emily Hogrefe-Ribeiro
Francesca Felicella (graduating this week with a master’s degree in art history)
Francesca was a publications intern in the summer of 2021 and mostly spent her time reading voluminous amounts of text, from the Green Symposium essays that ended up published as “Georgia Matters” earlier this year to Facet. She helped organize the “Small Talks” (recordings of contemporary photographers talking about their work) that will be published in the upcoming catalogue “Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund” so that we would have an idea of how much space they would take up on the page when transcribed. And she wrote wonderfully, including a great article on new Board of Advisors chair David Matheny. – Hillary Brown
Sara Idacavage
Sara is a fashion historian and doctoral student in the department of textiles, merchandising and interiors, and she’s also in the museum studies certificate program. Sara quickly became an indispensable part of the education team when she interned with us in fall 2021. She’s a great researcher and writer, and she created numerous Art at Home and Close Looking posts for social media. She’s also a talented museum educator, and she was a welcoming and engaging facilitator for in-person events like Family Days and other programs. She brought her expertise in fashion history to many projects, including two public gallery programs focused on Nick Cave’s “Soundsuit” and Italian Renaissance fashion in the Foschi exhibition. An Art in Focus gallery card she created will launch in summer 2022. Sara is finishing her doctoral degree next year, and I know she will go on to do great things! – Callan Steinmann
Kevin Khoshnood
Attentive, observant, detail oriented and an overall pleasant person to be around, Kevin was a wonderful addition to the registrars’ department this semester. He spent his days chipping away at unframing a collection of over 1,000 works on paper, mainly consisting of Italian Renaissance and Baroque drawings. He carefully and diligently unframed works, took measurements, edited images, researched artists and added object information to our collections database. We are so grateful for all his help and will miss him this coming semester, but we look forward to running into him in the galleries as a gallery guide! – Amber Barnhardt
Josie Lipton
Josie has only been with us, interning in publications, for one semester, but the amount of work she’s gotten done within that time is phenomenal. Mostly, she’s been tracking down high-resolution photographs and permissions for the upcoming publication “Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund.” Given that most of the artists are living photographers, it’s a tough task, requiring many different methods of communication, but she’s been persistent, cheerful and well organized throughout. We appreciate her contributions so much! – Hillary Brown
Grace McGibney (graduating this week with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy)
Development has been so lucky to have Grace with us this year. After not having students in the department for a year and a half we were a mess and totally disorganized. Grace was vital in getting the department reorganized and took on a huge scanning project to archive hundreds of board and committee files. She also assisted with board meetings, events, donor database work and daily activities of the department. Congrats, Grace! We wish you the best in your next endeavors! – Michele Turner
Kathrin Merritt (graduated in December with a degree in journalism and French and a Museum Studies certificate)
Kathrin was a public relations intern during both summer and fall semesters of 2021, and her background as a journalist at the Red & Black was so helpful! She wrote press releases, pitched successfully to media for exhibitions including “Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art” and “Collective Impressions: Modern Native American Printmakers,” helped a ton with calendaring and, mostly, wrote and wrote and wrote. She discovered that she loved working in museums, and her passion for the field is evident in her writing. – Hillary Brown
Kaitlyn Page (graduating this week with a degree in English and a minor in art history)
Kaitlyn has been interning in publications since the summer of 2021, and she has spent most of her time reading academic texts and tinkering with them to make them as clear and accessible as possible, from the Green Symposium book to the Foschi texts, “Graphic Eloquence” and the brochures for “Neo-Abstraction” and “Collective Impressions: Modern Native American Printmakers.” She’s helped track down images for several exhibition publications, and she pulled a gigantic amount of text out of an InDesign document and into a Word document for editing, for which I will forever be thankful. She has written blog posts, proofed Facet and did a huge amount of copyright research for “Graphic Eloquence.” She’s also made all of this look easy. We’ll miss her steady, reliable, smart contributions so much! – Hillary Brown
Tashana Powe
Tashana interned as a combination public relations/publications student in the summer of 2021. Some students that summer did their internships remotely, and Tashana was one of them, but we never felt like we couldn’t rely on her. She was a graduate student in history and museum studies at the University of West Georgia, with an interest in public history in particular. We were delighted to be a small part of adding to the skills of this future museum professional. – Hillary Brown
Uzoma Onovoh (graduating this week with degrees in international affairs and French and a Museum Studies certificate)
Uzoma interned with the education team in spring 2022, and was such an asset to our department as we began to reintroduce more in-person programs. She worked with audiences of all ages, helping out at Toddler Tuesdays, Family Days, Morning Mindfulness and Yoga in the Galleries. She also developed content and facilitated gallery activities for visitors at programs like Girl Scout Day, Slow Art Day and Homeschool Day. Uzoma is an excellent researcher and writer, and she created some wonderful Art at Home and Close Looking content for social media, and did fantastic research to help me and other educators prepare for Artful Conversations and other gallery programs. We wish her all the best! – Callan Steinmann
Ciel Rodriguez
Generous, thoughtful, and highly adaptable, Ciel was an invaluable addition to the American art department over the past year. She was deeply involved in multiple projects during her internship, but I was especially grateful that she lent her own knowledge and training in photography and printmaking (as a recent UGA MFA graduate) to two exhibitions: a project on Indigenous printmakers in fall 2021 and a touring exhibition on southern photography opening in fall 2022. She also spent long hours assisting visiting artist Yatika Starr Fields — with several late nights spilling into the wee hours of the morning — and helped Fields produce a new edition of over 50 screenprints in connection with the Native American printmaking project. We will miss her cheerful presence and creativity at the museum. – Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
Ciel was a pleasure to work with. She caught on quickly and was very receptive to the type of work we do in the Design and Preparation department. Ciel took part the intern frame building workshop that focuses on learning the proper uses of power tools in the woodshop while learning to building a frame. Students provide a work of art, and we supply the wood, and they leave with a framed work of art. – Todd Rivers
Chelsey Spencer
Shout out to Chelsey for always staying curious and asking questions! Chelsey was trained in spring 2022 to take over the Parker Research Assistantship this fall! – Gabriella Victorio
Gabriella Victorio
Gabriella interned with us in fall 2021, but I already knew her to be a talented and dedicated art educator from past experiences with her as a museum studies student and member of the Georgia Museum of Art Student Association. Gabby is working on her master’s degree in art education, and she consistently produced highly polished and creative work during her internship. She created content for Art at Home and Close Looking social media posts, developed interpretive materials and activity ideas for two Family Day programs and helped organize and pack soooo many art kits for school groups and youth programs. She is also a very talented artist, and she led a special embroidery Studio Workshop this winter. Gabriella is finishing her MAEd applied project this spring, a community-engaged art education program she created called the Linnentown Quilt Project. She will complete her student teaching in fall 2022. We are so proud of Gabby and can’t wait to see what she does next. – Callan Steinmann
