Graduate Students

Issy earned her undergraduate degree in Art History and Psychology from Mount Holyoke College. While in school she worked with both the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Most recently, she was one of the ’22 Cole Fellows at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site where she created and facilitated a new series of nature based art making activities and conducted original research on the history of land protection in the U.S. and our changing relationship with these protected spaces. Since coming back to the Boston area, she’s returned to the MFA as a museum educator and homeschool teacher. At Tufts she hopes to continue learning and thinking about museums and museum education as well as the interconnections between art, science, and the natural world.

Deniz comes from Istanbul, Turkey and she graduated from Boston University with a BA in Art History and a minor in Archaeology in 2023. She served as the President of Art History Association at BU and was a writer for Squinch Magazine, a student-run Art History magazine. She has interned at two art galleries in Boston, Pucker Gallery and the Guild of Boston Artists, and volunteered at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum.
Deniz holds interests in Global Contemporary Art and Documentary Photography. She is also interested in issues of representation and diversity in the museum world. She is dedicated to do research on Contemporary Turkish artists and countering marginalizing approaches to Turkish art; in doing so, she hopes that Contemporary Turkish artists can gain more visibility. She is also passionate about creating more diverse and accessible exhibition spaces in her future career.

Avery Dubyk graduated summa cum laude from Virginia Tech with a B.A. in Art History. As an undergraduate, he interned at the Blacksburg Museum and Cultural Foundation, where he conducted research on the history of the area for several exhibits and co-curated an exhibit on an important local movie theatre with another intern. As a scholar, he is particularly interested in American art, especially of the nineteenth century. He also has interests in exhibition design and planning and hopes to pursue a career in the museum field in the future.

A double Jumbo, Andrea graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University with a double major in History and History of Art and Architecture, as well as a minor in Political Science. Her undergraduate studies took an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Byzantine, Armenian, and Ancient Mediterranean art, architecture, history, and cultural heritage. Throughout her undergraduate career, she held internships at Christie’s, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at art works, an art advisory and curatorial projects firm. She’s also had the opportunity to conduct research for the Wardlaw Museum of the University of St Andrews, where she revealed some of the painful and hidden colonial histories of objects within their collections, and for the Tufts University Art Galleries, where she analyzed a 19th-century Armenian priest’s cope for the 2022 exhibition Connecting Threads / Survivor Objects. Andrea holds particular interests in transcultural artistic exchange, cultural heritage protection, provenance, repatriation, restitution, and the reconsideration of object narratives put forth by museums and other cultural institutions.

Yuting graduated cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022, double majored in Art History and Economics with double departmental honors and minored in Math. While at UCLA, she developed research interests in modern art and completed an honors thesis on Man Ray's films. She had been focusing on pursuing an academic path in Economics before deciding to go to graduate school art history. During her time at Tufts, Yuting hopes to continue exploring her interests in modern art, especially avant-garde cinema.

Naomi graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, double majored in Art History and English, and minored in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Jewish Studies. During her undergraduate career, Naomi held internships at a special collections library, a commercial gallery, an arts publication, the Fairfield University Art Museum, the Derfner Judaica Museum, and The Jewish Museum. After graduation, Naomi held positions at Christie’s and The Bruce Museum before returning to graduate school. During her undergraduate career, Naomi researched female Jewish art dealers in the early 20th century and how associations with Expressionists and Fauvists and contemporary social events within the European Jewish community resulted in their erasure from greater art historical narratives. While at Tufts, she intends to continue pursuing this interest and connect the interests created in her undergraduate career to provenance and Nazi-looted art.

Sofia conducted her undergraduate studies at Bryn Mawr College where she earned her degree in History of Art. While at college, she worked in Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections in the Rare Book and Manuscripts Department. In her final year of college, she conducted research on a collection of Congolese water vessels. Her experience researching these was expanded when she began volunteering in the Penn Museum’s African Art Collection. After her undergraduate experience, Sofia relocated to Seattle where she worked at the Seattle Children’s Museum. At Tufts, Sofia hopes to continue to learn and contemplate museums, art history, and the ethics of museum collections.

Nick (he/him/his) is a non-traditional graduate student, changing careers after nearly a decade spent in healthcare. He completed bachelor's degrees in art history and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a doctorate in osteopathic medicine from the New York Institute of Technology. Recently, he has interned for the University of Colorado Boulder Art Museum and the Longmont Museum and was honored to serve as commencement speaker for the Art & Art History graduation at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research interests focus on the contemporary arts and their intersections with community, disenfranchised peoples, and scientific fields. Nick is joining Tufts University to further his life long passion for the arts, switching careers from medicine to museums where he hopes to work with practicing artists to cultivate inclusive, cathartic, and community-oriented environments.