Stanford University Department of Art & Art History

Congratulations to our 2026 graduates! ❤️🌲🎓

📸: Sommer Wood

Take a look inside the 2026 MFA Documentary Film & Video Thesis Catalog, a publication that celebrates the playful spirit of this year’s thesis films and the collaboration between our MFA filmmakers and PhD scholars. Edited by Art History PhD student Rebecca Turner, the catalog features contributions by Stanford PhD students Kyéra Sterling, Adina Glickstein, Mariana Hebling, Prashant Parvataneni, and Lucas Baisch. ✨

Printed copies will be available while supplies last at the thesis screening this Saturday, June 13, at 2pm in Oshman Hall! Visit the link in our bio for more information.

Calling Tomorrow
by Gideon Elron
As the streets of San Francisco reveal a city perched at the brink of an uncanny future, a father and son contemplate the meaning of progress.
(15 min)

Join us on June 11 at 6pm for a screening of five short films from first-year students in the MFA Documentary Film program. 🎥 Visit the link in our bio for more info.

Verticalization
by Jeanne Zhang
Inside a typical day of a micro-drama production crew in Los Angeles, where labor and attention are reorganized around vertical screens.
(10 min)

Join us on June 11 at 6pm for a screening of five short films from first-year students in the MFA Documentary Film program. 🎥 Visit the link in our bio for more info.

Edgelands
by Sarah Genge
Through the remains left on the roadside, nature and the human-built world collide.
(10 min)

Join us on June 11 at 6pm for a screening of five short films from first-year students in the MFA Documentary Film program. 🎥 Visit the link in our bio for more info.

The Gaps Between Us
by Mariam Atallah
Against the backdrop of the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life, the film explores the limits of empathy and the ways loss moves across distance.
(15 min)

Join us on June 11 at 6pm for a screening of five short films from first-year students in the MFA Documentary Film program. 🎥 Visit the link in our bio for more info.

Apart
by Tania Castillo
In a small beauty salon, women care for each other while carrying what they left behind.
(15 min)

Join us on June 11 at 6pm for a screening of five short films from first-year students in the MFA Documentary Film program. 🎥 Visit the link in our bio for more info.

PLAY IT AGAIN! Join us next Saturday at 2pm for a screening of five thesis films by the Documentary MFA Class of 2026!

Filmmakers:
Pedro Marnoto
Johanna Gustin
Zoe Valery
Devon Blackwell
María Luisa Santos

This event is free & open to the public, but seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Once Oshman Hall reaches capacity, overflow seating with a livestream of the screening will be available in a nearby room. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and a reception. Please note that the post-screening Q&A will not be broadcast to overflow seating.

🎞️🎞️🎞️



Every Dream I May Have With You
by Pedro Marnoto
On the edge of a Portuguese fishing port, Bela tries to rescue her aging mother’s scattered memories of a life bound by the sea. Their voices awaken the ghosts inside the rusted hull of the Argus – the famed ship that once carried Bela’s father on the deadly search for cod.
(24 min)

Legs
by Johanna Gustin
For $100,000, an orthopedic surgeon in Las Vegas will break your legs so you can grow just a few inches taller. Cosmetic limb-lengthening is a booming business, and patients are desperate to reinvent themselves at any cost.
(23 min)

Batalla Naval
by Zoe Valery
Mirroring U.S.-Venezuela tensions at sea, father and daughter play Battleship, as they have done remotely for a decade apart. Behind the screen of war games, they find oil, petro-magic, and each other by the Lake of Maracaibo.
(25 min)

This Friday
by Devon Blackwell
A daughter pieces together what remains of the Jamaica her mother left behind at the age of ten. In the fragments of her mother’s forgotten childhood, she finds the edges of memory.
(13 min)

Corriente Eléctrica
by María Luisa Santos
Escazú has forgotten the witch it once feared. Corriente Eléctrica tries to find this witch but uncovers the new stories of fear that have emerged in her absence.
(18 min)

Come Straight Home, the 2026 Senior Exhibition at Stanford University, showcases the work of eight graduating seniors majoring in Art Practice. These talented artists: Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch, Grace Flynn, Nova Goode-Williams, Nathaniel Mensah, Zoë Rehnborg, Aileen Rubio, Jude Wolf, and Seiji Yang have each been on a journey of discovery and learning culminating in their thesis exhibition. The title of the exhibition speaks to the momentous milestone this event signifies, sparked by this shift from college student to graduate, art student to artist. Join us in celebrating these students and their accomplishments. ✨🎓

On View: May 26-June 4, 2026
Coulter Art Gallery, 355 Roth Way
Open weekdays, 12-5pm
Curated by Dana Hemenway
Final Viewing: June 14, 10am-12pm, 2:15-2:45pm
Free & open to the public

📸: Claire Haughey
Featuring works by (in order): Aileen Rubio, Jude Wolf, Seiji Yang, Nathaniel Mensah, Nova Goode-Williams, Grace Flynn, Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch, and Zoë Rehnborg.

This is the final week to experience SECOND HOLE SECOND WAVE, the 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition featuring work by Alexa Burrell, Vincent Chong, Enam Gbewonyo, Hudson Hatfield, and Bailey Scieszka. ✨

Working across sculpture, installation, video, painting, photography, and textiles, these artists return to familiar forms, images, materials, and histories. Rather than treating the past as fixed, they approach it as something still active, something that continues to shape how people move through the world, how they are seen, and how they make meaning. Together, their works imagine other openings, other futures, and another way through.

On view through June 4!
Stanford Art Gallery, 419 Lasuen Mall
Open weekdays, 12–5pm
Curated by Jonathan Calm
Free & open to the public

The exhibition will also reopen for one final viewing during Stanford Commencement on June 14.

Don’t miss the culmination of two years of research, experimentation, and artmaking by this graduating MFA cohort. 🎓🪄

📸: Claire Haughey

AVOID EYE CONTACT 🫣 A spring screening of recent films by our first-year MFA students is coming to Oshman Hall on Thursday, June 11 at 6pm!

This event is free & open to the public, but seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and a reception.

Filmmakers:
Mariam Atallah
Tania Castillo
Gideon Elron
Sarah Genge
Jeanne Zhang

The Department of Art & Art History is now accepting applications for part-time Lecturer positions in studio art for the 2027–28 academic year. 📥

We invite applications from artists and educators working across drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, digital and experimental media. Applicants should hold a terminal degree in a relevant field (or equivalent professional experience) and have university or college teaching experience.

Complete applications received by Oct. 31 will be given consideration for all quarters of the 2027–28 academic year.

Learn more and apply via the link in our bio or visit art.stanford.edu.

📸: Misha Bruk for Stanford University

Bissera V. Pentcheva, the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art at Stanford University, has been awarded the 2026 Gutenberg Research Award, the highest research honor conferred by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Awarded annually by the Gutenberg Research College (GRC), the prize recognizes outstanding international researchers. ✨🏛️🎶

“Bissera Pentcheva is one of the leading international scholars in the field of Byzantine and Medieval art history and commands an outstanding academic reputation,” said Prof. Mita Banerjee, Director of the GRC. “Her research is not only per se remarkable but its influence goes far beyond the boundaries of her particular subject.”

Pentcheva was recognized for her groundbreaking interdisciplinary research on the sensory dimensions of sacred spaces, exploring the relationships among architecture, liturgy, music, acoustics, light, and visual perception. Her work on the Hagia Sophia and other Byzantine and medieval ecclesiastical structures has reshaped the study of sacred environments through collaborations spanning musicology, physics, acoustics, anthropology, and the digital humanities.

The award will be presented on May 18 in Mainz, Germany. During her visit, Pentcheva will also deliver the annual lecture for the university’s Institute of Art History and Musicology and participate in a lecture-concert exploring Byzantine and medieval sacred music traditions.

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Image 1: Prof. Pentcheva. Photo/©: Lisa DeNeffe Photography
Image 2: Installation view of AudioVision in the Middle Ages: Sainte-Foy at Conques, curated by B. Pentcheva at Stanford Art Gallery, Jan 24–Mar 17, 2023. Photo by Susana Barron.
Image 3: Auralizing the Medieval Image: Music from the Liturgy of Sainte-Foy at Conques, presented at Bing Concert Hall on February 10, 2023, featuring Marcel Pérès and Ensemble Organum. The performance recreated the vespers of the eleventh-century Office of Sainte-Foy, accompanied by a scrim projection of the statue of Sainte Foy. Photo by Susana Barron.

Join us for the next installment of the Weintz Art Lecture Series featuring art historian Maggie Cao and her lecture, “Ivory Archives and Temporalities at Sea.” 🌊

In the nineteenth century, whale ivory moved between US-based whalers, China trade merchants, and Indigenous Fijians. What if we consider this material as a kind of archive, on which whalemen logged their voyages and through which Indigenous people marked their social lives? This talk uses marine ivory to rethink temporality and timekeeping in colonial contexts. By examining Western and Indigenous ideas of time as well as the non-human time of whales, Cao proposes that whale ivory can help us understand maritime encounters between cultures and across species.

📅 Thursday, May 21
🕠 5:30–7:00 PM
📍 Oshman Hall
🔗 RSVP link in bio

Maggie Cao [pronounced “Chow”] is the David G. Frey Associate Professor of art history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She studies the visual and material culture of globalization, particularly at the intersections of art, science, and economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States. She is the author of two books: The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (2018), and Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (2025). Her current research focuses on artistic engagements with ecological time. She is also one of the editors of the interdisciplinary journal Grey Room.

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Made possible by the J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz Art Lecture Series Fund, this series invites distinguished art historians from diverse concentrations each quarter to speak and engage with our students and the Stanford community, enriching the culture of art history and appreciation on campus and beyond.