Vanessa S. Troiano is an author, educator, and Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her forthcoming doctoral dissertation, titled “Susan Weil: Artistic Trailblazer,” is the first scholarly monograph to survey the career of the contemporary American artist Susan Weil (b. 1930). Conceived with the approval of Weil and her family, Vanessa’s dissertation challenges the ongoing erasure of women artists by engaging in feminist approaches to revisionist history in order to confer agency onto Weil and inscribe her achievements into art’s history. As a specialist in modern and contemporary art, Vanessa’s interests include women’s art, activist art, and art history pedagogy. Her writings have appeared in Routledge Research in Art History, Smarthistory, and Art History Teaching Resources. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Fulbright teaching assistantship in Vienna and a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) scholarship at Goethe-Institut, Berlin. Prior to CUNY, Vanessa earned degrees in Art History from Wellesley College and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She currently teaches at CUNY’s City College and Queensborough campuses. She previously taught at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Brooklyn College.
