Rembrandt’s Multicultural Society

Michele Frederick is Curator of European Art and Provenance Research at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she is responsible for the Museum’s collection of Northern European paintings. She holds a PhD in 17th-century Dutch art from the University of Delaware and is a specialist in portraiture and identity in the Early Modern Netherlands. She has previously held positions at Berea College and The Cleveland Museum of Art and served as the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Interpretive Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Since joining the NCMA in 2019, she has curated multiple collaborative exhibitions, most recently The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt in partnership with the Jewish Museum, New York.

Instagram handle is @honthorstorian

Nazanin Hedayat Munroe is Director of Textiles and Associate Professor at City University of New York. An artist and art historian, she received her PhD in historic textiles from University of Bern, Switzerland where her research focused on dress and material culture of the early modern Persianate world. She is author of three books and several articles, publishing her research in the Textile Museum Journal, HALI magazine, and The Metropolitan Museum’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, where she was an educator and textile specialist from 2011 to 2016. Her monograph Sufi Lovers, Safavid Silks and Early Modern Identity (2023), a study linking Safavid textiles depicting Sufi themes to Persian literary epics as a mode of self-expression, received the R.L. Shep Award for outstanding research in global textile studies from Textile Society of America.
An award-winning artist and NEA grant recipient, she received her MFA in fiber and textiles from the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art and has exhibited her textile installations in museums across the country.

Website: nazanin.us
CUNY Graduate Center Faculty page: gc.cuny.edu/people/nazanin-hedayat-munroe
City Tech Faculty Page:  citytech.cuny.edu/faculty-staff/
Social Media - LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nazanin-hedayat-munroe-ph-d/

Michael Zell is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. He has published widely on 17-century Dutch artistic culture, with a particular focus on Rembrandt and Vermeer. He is the author of Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (2002) and Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (2021), as well as co-editor with Alan Chong of Rethinking Rembrandt (2002) and Walter S. Melion of Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500–1700 (2017). In addition to co-curating with Simona Di Nepi the MFA exhibition Reality and Imagination: Rembrandt and the Jews in the Dutch Republic, he was co-curator with Joseph Koerner of the exhibition Lifeworld: Portrait and Landscape in Netherlandish Prints, 1550–1650 at the Harvard Art Museums (1999–2000).

Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian, who is currently William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. An expert in nineteenth-century American and French art, she has curated eight exhibitions during her tenure at the Gardner and edited four exhibition catalogs. These include Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory (2025), Manet: A Model Family (2024), and Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer (2023). She is also the co-author (with Nathaniel Silver) of Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (2022). Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

In addition to being a curator, her academic research uses both statistical and qualitative analyses to explore the relationship between art and broader social and economic change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.

She received a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. Before doctoral study, Diana earned an MPhil in Economic and Social History from Oxford and received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Columbia University.