DALLAS, TX.- Today the Meadows Museum, SMU, announced its 2021 curatorial fellowship appointments. Clarisse Fava-Piz, who will begin her term with a doctorate in art history from the University of Pittsburgh, specializes in 19th-century European art and will serve as the Mellon Curatorial Fellow for a period of two years. Miranda Saylor, a doctoral candidate at UCLA who has focused her research on early modern Spain, will join the institution for a one-year term as the Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow. The two scholars begin their terms in September 2021.

The fellowships provide scholars at different stages of their careers with the opportunity to develop new scholarship in Spanish art and gain invaluable professional experience in the Meadows Museum’s curatorial department. Fellows are selected through a multitiered review process led by the museum’s director and leadership from the curatorial and education departments, and following an international call for applications. The post-doctoral Mellon Curatorial Fellowship provides an annual stipend of $50,000 and substantial funding for research and travel. The CSA fellowship includes an annual stipend of $40,000.

“We are eager to welcome Clarisse and Miranda to the Meadows Museum this fall,” said Mark A. Roglán, the Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum. “They both have very impressive academic backgrounds, and specialties that can be further enhanced by strengths in the Meadows’s collection of Spanish art. We look forward to the scholarship each will bring to the field of Spanish art history.”

Clarisse Fava-Piz joins the Meadows Museum following a two-month research grant at Casa de Velázquez in Madrid and has previously held positions at the Getty Research Institute; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. Her dissertation examines transatlantic exchanges in sculpture between France, Spain, the U.S. and Argentina during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. She holds a master’s degree in art history from the Université Paris Nanterre, where she explored questions of transnationalism that emerged with the migration of Spanish sculptors to Paris Salons between 1880 and 1914. At the Meadows, Fava-Piz intends to “undertake in-depth research on the 19th-century paintings, including works by lesser-known artists, in order to better understand the contribution of Spanish art to the history of modernism.”

Miranda Saylor is pursuing a doctorate in art history at UCLA and holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude. Saylor’s research focuses on early modern Spain. Her recent focus has been the Mystical City of God, an influential biography of the Virgin Mary written by the 17th-century visionary Sor María de Ágreda, and its impact on sacred art in the Spanish empire. Saylor has held multiple fellowships, including the UCLA Dickson Fellowship; Fulbright-García Robles Research Fellowship; and the Penn Museum Curatorial Fellowship. She has assisted on curatorial projects at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, El Museo del Barrio in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At the Meadows Museum, Saylor looks forward to the closer examination of the museum’s collection of sacred art and portraiture.