PROVIDENCE, RI.- John W. Smith, Director of the RISD Museum, announced the appointments of two new RISD Museum curatorial staff members, Anita Bateman and Jamie Gabbarelli, as well as the selection of the 2018 Artist Fellow, Becci Davis.

Anita Bateman joined the RISD Museum in July 2017 as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Anita has a BA (cum laude) from Williams College, and MA from Duke University where she is a PhD candidate (ABD) in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. She specializes in modern and contemporary African art and the art of the African diaspora with additional interests in the history of photography, an inclusive view of feminism, and the role of social media in activism and contemporary art. Her dissertation examines the photography of Ethiopia in the context of nationalism, Italian imperialism, and the influence of Marxism-Leninism. In addition, she attends to Ethiopia's current status as a center of art and the ways in which Habesha and Oromo ethnic groups are represented in images and social media. She has held positions at the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, and at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, NC.

A native of Assisi, Italy (and a dual Italian and British national), Jamie Gabbarelli joins the Museum in late November as the Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Jamie is a graduate of Oxford University, and holds an MA from the Warburg Institute in London, and a PhD in History of Art and Renaissance Studies from Yale University. From 2015 to 2017 he was the Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow in Old Master Prints at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Previously, he held curatorial fellowships at the British Museum (2009), the Yale University Art Gallery (2010-13), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2014-15). His research has focused on sixteenth-century Italian and Flemish printmaking, and the relationship between prints and other media. Most recently, he curated the exhibition
Sharing Images: Renaissance Prints into Maiolica and Bronze, due to open at the National Gallery of Art in Spring 2018, and accompanied by a catalogue he authored. He has published articles on Renaissance printmaking in Print Quarterly, Delineavit & Sculpsit, and the Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin. A forthcoming article will be published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in winter 2018. He has also contributed catalogue entries to Francesco Vanni: Art in Late Renaissance Siena (Yale University Press: 2013), Marcantonio Raimondi, Raphael and the image multiplied (Manchester University Press: 2016), and The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy (LACMA: 2018).

Becci Davis begins her Artist Fellowship at the RISD Museum in January, 2018. Becci was born in Fort Benning, Georgia. She spent her early years playing in her grandparents' backyard in nearby Columbus and her teenage years exploring the fields and forests of her parents' farmland in Louisville, Georgia. She earned her BFA with honors from Columbus State University and her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design. Becci is an interdisciplinary artist, collecting images, documents, and oral narratives, which, combined with her own interpretation and response, create a new history and personal geography. Currently, she lives with her family in Wakefield, RI.