A specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art, Irina teaches art and architectural history at Columbia University where she also earned her PhD in 2003. She has published numerous articles in her field, worked for several New York Old Master galleries, and received fellowships for her academic work from the National Gallery in Washington, the Fulbright Foundation, the Getty, the Society of Fellows and the Italian Academy (both at Columbia) and the American Philosophical Society. In addition to teaching in her area of specialization, Irina, a native New Yorker with a deep interest in local history, has been offering a class on the architecture of New York City at Columbia for the past four years.

Louis Mazzari has taught American history, art, and literature for a dozen years in Istanbul, Turkey, at Bogazici University, the country’s most renowned university, and he now also teaches in the City University of New York system. He has published books and articles on the cultural and political history of the U.S. with the university presses of LSU, Yale, and South Carolina. His New York work has included a study of the documentary aesthetic of photographer Berenice Abbott. Mazzari previously served as managing editor of the anthropology journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and he worked on the editorial staff of the Harvard Educational Review. His years in a variety of classrooms have focused on the intersection of the artwork and its cultural history, and he speaks to American art’s profusion and its diversity of intentions and effects. That mix of art and culture is at the center of his presentation of the abundance of the Met’s American Wing.

Born in England but raised in Amherst, MA, John is a specialist in modern and contemporary art history and is always especially excited to share his knowledge of these fields. He received a PhD from Emory University in 2015. His dissertation analyzes new art forms that emerged in the 1960s. From 2015-2017, he was a postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the National Gallery of Art. He has taught at Harvard University, the Pratt Institute, the Fashion Institute of Technology, George Washington University, and UMass. Whether offering introductory surveys or specialized graduate courses, he always leads classes on visits to area art galleries and museums. John is the author of articles in various peer-reviewed journals and has delivered papers and lectures at a range of institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Princeton University, and Harvard. Additionally, he was the recipient of major fellowships from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the American Council of Learned Societies/Henry Luce Foundation. Prior to graduate school, John taught English in Salamanca, Spain. He offers tours in Spanish and is accustomed to interactions with non-native speakers of English.