Kristen Nassif

Kristen Nassif is the Curator of Collections at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the Fralin, Kristen was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She has also held positions at the Bruce Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has curated and assisted with exhibitions on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American art, including Selections from the North American Collection: People and Places (2024); Material Matters: The Sculptures of Elie Nadelman (2023); Collection Installation: Connecticut Impressionism (2023); An American Journey: The Art of John Sloan (2017); and Whistler and Roussel: Linked Visions (2015). 

Kristen received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Delaware in 2022. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American art, visual culture, material culture, and disability history. Her prize-winning dissertation, “Unseeing Sight: Blindness in American Art and Material Culture,” explores how the loss or absence of sight fundamentally shaped experiences of making and understanding art objects between the 1870s and 1890s in the United States. Her recent publications include a chapter on John Haberle in The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability, catalog essays for the Thyssen-Bornemisza’s exhibition “Hyperreal. The Art of Trompe l’Oeil,” and essays for The Journal of the Walters Art Museum (forthcoming), the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Bloomsbury Cultural History, and the Biggs Museum of American Art. Kristen currently serves on the boards of the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) and the Disability History Association (DHA).