Art History PhD candidate Jana La Brasca has been awarded two fellowships: one at the Menil Drawing Institute from September 2024 to May 2025, followed by a Douglass Foundation predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in summer 2025. La Brasca was also named a P.E.O. scholar, which is only awarded to 100 doctoral students in the US and Canada.
Jana La Brasca is a researcher, writer, and PhD candidate in art history specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation, focused on sculpture, drawings, and conceptual projects by Alice Aycock created between 1968 and 1986, led to her appointment as curatorial researcher for Groundswell: Women of Land Art, at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Previously, she held the Mellon curatorial fellowship in Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, where she co-organized the exhibition Without Limits: Helen Frankenthaler, Abstraction and the Language of Print and contributed to After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints. Prior to doctoral study, she was the catalogue raisonné research fellow at Judd Foundation, in Marfa, Texas, and New York. She has presented her work at Marfa Book Company, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Henry Moore Institute, the Menil Drawing Institute, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Art Galleries at Black Studies, and Women and Their Work. Examples of her writing can be found here.