Claire Ittner is a historian of modern and contemporary art in the Americas with particular interest in the art and visual culture of the African Diaspora in the American South and the Caribbean. Her research interests include questions of mobility and migration, patronage networks and theories of artistic value, and notions of expertise and training.  

Her current book project, Fellow Travelers: The Artist-Researchers of the Rosenwald Fellowship Program, 1928–1948, examines the relationship between the non-profit sector and the arts, focusing on the merit-based fellowship programs that emerged as an important source of artistic support in the first half of the twentieth century. Examining one such fellowship program, the Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship program, the project tracks the ways its support was utilized by a generation of Black artists and its role in forging new ideas about artmaking as a form of research.  

Ittner’s work has been published in Nka: A Journal of Contemporary African Art and the Metropolitan Museum Journal. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

She holds an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, a BA from Davidson College, and will receive her PhD from UC Berkeley in May. 

Please join us in welcoming Claire Ittner to the CVPA family!