Center for Latter-day Saint Arts Publishes Landmark Volume with Oxford University Press

Richard Lyman Bushman is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University and author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). He has written on American social and cultural history including The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992) and From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order, 1690– 1765 (1967), which received the Bancroft Prize in American History.

Terryl Givens did his graduate work in intellectual history (Cornell) and comparative literature (UNC Chapel Hill). For many years he held the Jabez A. Bostwick Chair of English at the University of Richmond, and he is now the Neal A. Maxwell Research Fellow at Brigham Young University. His work includes a two-volume history of Mormon thought, Wrestling the Angel and Feeding the Flock; People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture; and several studies in LDS scripture, biography, and theology.

Colleen McDannell is a professor of history and the Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a specialist in American religions. In 2019, her book Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy won an award given by the Organization of American Historians. Her publications in visual and material culture include the edited volume Catholics in the Movies (2007), Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (2004), and now classic Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (1995).

Randy Astle is a filmmaker and writer in New York City. His works include Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952 (2018) and more than sixty articles and presentations on Mormon art and film. He has also taught Mormon cinema at Brigham Young University, edited special issues of BYU Studies and Mormon Artist, served as film and photography editor for the Association for Mormon Letters’ journal Irreantum, programmed film screenings for the Sunstone Summer Symposium, and created the annual academic forum at the first LDS Film Festival in 2001.

Ashlee Whitaker Evans was the head curator and the Roy & Carol Christensen Curator of Religious Art at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art. Prior to coming to BYU, she was associate curator and registrar at the Springville Museum of Art. Whitaker is an alumna of BYU, graduating summa cum laude with degrees in art history and curatorial studies. Her research interests span religious art and visual culture, as well as western regional American art. Ashlee has curated numerous exhibitions, including Rend the Heavens: Intersections of the Human and Divine, In the Arena: The Art of Mahonri Young, The Interpretation Thereof: Contemporary LDS Art and Scripture, Capturing the Canyons: Artists in the National Parks, and Moving Pictures: C. C. A. Christensen’s Mormon Panorama.

Nathan Rees is an associate professor of art history at the University of West Georgia. His research focuses on the intersection of race and religion in American visual culture. He has published and presented on topics ranging from the influence of metaphysical religion on twentieth- century abstractionists’ encounters with Native Americans to the representation of race in the visual culture of southeastern shape note hymnody. He is the author of Mormon Visual Culture and the American West (2021).

Jennifer Reeder is the nineteenth- century women’s history specialist at the LDS Church History Department in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has co- authored three collections of women’s writings and written a narrative history of Emma Smith. Reeder grew up playing under the quilts her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother sewed, and has an innate interest in folk art. At George Mason University, where she earned her PhD in American history, Reeder studied religious history, memory, and material culture.

Heather Belnap is a professor of art history and curatorial studies and a global women’s studies affiliate at Brigham Young University. She presents and publishes widely in feminist and cultural history, including the fields of Utah and Mormon studies. Recent publications in these areas include the book Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-Century France (2022) and a special issue for the Utah Historical Quarterly on Utah women in the arts at midcentury (2023). Belnap is currently working on a biography of Minerva Teichert and a book project on Utah women and the arts.

Josh Probert is an independent historian and historic design consultant who specializes in the material culture of nineteenth-century domestic and religious life. A graduate of the Program in Religion and the Arts at Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music, he earned a PhD from the University of Delaware in cooperation with the Winterthur Museum.

Mary Campbell is an associate professor of American art history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A lawyer as well as an art historian, she works on the intersections of race, gender, and the law in the arts of the United States. Her first book, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image (University of Chicago Press, 2016), received the support of the Stanford Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her current book project, the first art historical monograph on the work of the painter Beauford Delaney (1901– 1979), was supported by the UTK Humanities Center and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Campbell received her JD from Yale Law School and her PhD from Stanford University. She clerked for the Honorable Sharon Prost of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and is a member of the New York Bar Association.

Rebecca Janzen is a professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She is a scholar of gender, disability, and religious studies in Mexican literature and culture whose research focuses on excluded populations in Mexico. She is the author of The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control (2015), Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (2018), and Unholy Trinity: State, Church and Film in Mexico (2021). Her most recent book, Unlawful Violence: Law and Cultural Production in 21st Century Mexico (2022), is about human rights, law, and literature. The Hagley Library, the Plett Foundation, the Kreider Fellowship at Elizabethtown College, the C. Henry Smith Peace Trust, and the Newberry Library in Chicago have supported her research.

James Swensen is a professor of art history and the history of photography at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography (2015) and In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, 1953– 1954 (2018).

Linda Jones Gibbs, an independent scholar living in New York and has a PhD in art history from the City University of New York with specialties in American and modern art. Jones Gibbs was a former curator at the Museum of Church History in Salt Lake City and the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University. She has written extensively on American artists in France and on the artist Maynard Dixon.

Glen Nelson is the author of thirty-three books, as well as essays, articles, short fiction, and poetry. As a ghostwriter, three of his books have been nonfiction New York Times bestsellers. He curated the museum exhibition John Held, Jr. at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art and co-curated Joseph Paul Vorst: A Retrospective at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. His most recent books include the first biography of Joseph Paul Vorst and a volume about the lost fiction of John Held, Jr.

A freelance journalist in Washington, D.C., Menachem Wecker holds a master’s in art history from George Washington University. He has published frequently on the intersection of faith and the arts, in both general-interest and scholarly publications.

W. Paul Reeve is chair of the History Department and Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah. He is author of Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford, 2015) and Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood (Deseret Book, 2023). He is project manager and general editor of an awardwinning digital database, Century of Black Mormons, designed to name and identify all known Black Latter-day Saints baptized into the faith between 1830 and 1930. The database is live at CenturyofBlackMormons.org.

Carlyle Constantino is a doctoral student in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With both a BA and MA in art history and curatorial studies from Brigham Young University, Constantino interrogates race and image in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her current research and dissertation project, titled “Confinable People: The Role of Photography in U.S. Internment Camps,” examine several areas of interest: slavery, carceral studies, photography, memory, and citizenship.

Mason Kamana Allred is an assistant professor of communication, media, and culture at Brigham Young University, Hawaii. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in film studies. He is the author of Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity (2017) and Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism (2023).

Amanda K. Beardsley is the Cayleff and Sakai Faculty Scholar at San Diego State University and received her PhD in art history from Binghamton University. Her research and publications have ranged from sound studies and feminism in Mormon culture to science and technology studies, gender, and faith.

Laura Paulsen Howe is the art curator over global acquisitions at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. She curated the 12th International Art Competition: All Are Alike unto God (2022) and With This Covenant in My Heart: The Art and Faith of Minerva Teichert (2023). Her research has focused on places of display, analyzing how the meaning of a work changes when shown in different environments.

Analisa Coats Sato is a doctoral candidate in art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has taught twentieth-century art history at colleges throughout the New York City metro area and has worked as a curatorial researcher for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Currently she is finishing her dissertation on postwar U.S. fiber art.

Chase Westfall is an artist, musician, and curator. In 2017, he joined VCUarts at Virginia Commonwealth University as curator of student exhibitions and programs, where he serves as director of the Anderson Museum and oversees an evolving program of student and professional exhibitions, including the annual VCUarts MFA thesis exhibition. Recent projects include Stone’s Throw: Arte de Sanación, Arte de Resistencia (2020), a survey of contemporary Central American artists, curated with Laura August; Carmen Winant: Fire on World (2019); When the Whirlwind Begins (2019), a student-curated survey of Philadelphia artists; Ron Rege Jr: From the Word of First Thought (2019), coorganized with Dem Passwords, Los Angeles; Daniel Everett and Leah Beeferman: Surface Tension, Surface Tenses (2019); and Caitlin Cherry: Etherpaint (2018). He is the curator of a thematic survey of contemporary Latter-day Saint art, Great Awakening, organized by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, New York.

Laura Allred Hurtado is the executive director of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and former global acquisitions art curator at the Church History Museum. Recent curatorial projects include Guerrilla Girls: A Retrospective (UMOCA) and Angels Don’t Cry, Demons Don’t Cry (Nox Contemporary). She is the author of several publications, including A Long Mournful Cry (Mormon Art Center), Back of Shadows: Wayne Brungard (University of Colorado, Denver), A 15-Year Expanse (Actual Source), Immediate Present (Mormon Arts Center), and Saints at Devil’s Gate (Church Historian’s Press).