Rachel Vorsanger (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Her research focuses on modern art in the United States and Spain, centering women’s abstraction, transnational exchange, and the politics of modernism. Her dissertation examines women abstract artists in the mid-twentieth century working across the distinct political and cultural contexts of the United States and Francoist Spain.

Rachel is currently the Curatorial Assistant at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her previous museum and research experience includes work at the Barnes Foundation, the Betty Parsons Foundation, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, the Picasso Museum Barcelona, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She compiled and edited Phase I of the Betty Parsons Catalogue Raisonné and has presented her research on Parsons and postwar abstraction at the Americas Society in conjunction with the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her forthcoming chapter, “Abstracting Soft Power: Betty Parsons and the Gendered Labor of Cold War Cultural Diplomacy,” will appear in the anthology Office Hours: Women Artists at Work in the Art World.

At Tyler, Rachel co-curated The Art of the Book: Treasures from the Special Collections Research Center, edited its accompanying catalogue, and presented her archival findings at the exhibition’s opening symposium. She has also designed and taught courses on European modernism and received the Marcia Hall Research Award in support of her dissertation research.

MA, Art History and Archaeology, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, 2017

BA, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, The George Washington University, 2011