PhD in Art History
Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie
Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie (they/them) is a PhD student and University Fellow who specializes in the decorative arts of early modern northern Europe, with research interests in materiality and the embodied knowledge of artisans making and working with glass within the Holy Roman Empire. Before pursuing their doctoral studies, from 2017 to 2023 they held a curatorial research position in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s department of European Sculpture and Decorative Art, where they supported the exhibitions Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe (2019), Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (2021), and the re-installation of the permanent Northern Renaissance Decorative Art and Sculpture Gallery (2023).
They earned their M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, New York, where they were a Bard Graduate Center Fellow and were awarded the 2016 Windgate Fellowship in Craft. Their M.A. Thesis, which considered the iconographic and material resonances of a covered cup produced in the court glass workshop of Archduke Ferdinand II, won the Clive Wainwright Award for Outstanding Qualifying Paper. They graduated with honors from the University of Kings College with a B.A. in the History of Science and Technology, where they were awarded both the Thesis Prize and the University Medal in History of Science and Technology.
Advisor: Ashley West, PhD