Department of Art & Art History’s Professor Elena Shtromberg has been awarded a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. for her research project, "Mobile Memories: Video Art and the Politics of Remembering."
Temma Balducci, the Mary Lois Wheatley Presidential Endowed Chair in Art and Art History, noted this fellowship "is one of the most prestigious and highly competitive honors in art history." The process is highly selective because the center awards five to 12 awards at most, globally each year. "It’s really an amazing accomplishment for her and the department," remarked Balducci.
Shtromberg’s fellowship will take place Fall 2026 and her manuscript will address a critical gap in scholarship that theorizes the global emergence and relevance of video art. The overall project examines how video's capacity to record and layer moments of remembering with intentional erasures and revisions have made it a particularly potent medium for artists grappling with historical memory, especially in contexts marked by political violence, displacement, or historical erasure. At the same time, the project challenges the Eurocentric narrative that has dominated discussions of video art's development. While existing initiatives like NYU's "Mapping Video Art" attempted to visualize the medium's expansion, they have inadvertently perpetuated geographic biases, rendering vast regions of creative production virtually invisible.
Check back for updates: https://www.nga.gov/research/center/current-fellows