Current Student Research
Amjad Alnakhal
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Amjad Alnakhala’s research interests lie at the intersection of art and visual culture with interactive multimedia to transform digital education. His goal is to innovate and design e-learning methodologies that overcome educational disruption in emergencies to sustained learning in conflict zones like Palestine, leveraging cinematic storytelling, creative digital formats, and AI tools.
Aleesha Amjad
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Aleesha Amjad’s research is about the history of Islamic miniature painting. The interest in this research starts with a love for storytelling and the various historical interpretations of religious figures, with an eye to the cultural and artistic impact of European medieval traditions of miniature paintings in illuminated manuscripts as well as Chinese painting.
Ginger Carlson
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Yelena Gluzman
Ginger Carlson’s research considers the contemporary art practices of chronically ill and disabled artists who use creative access as methodology. Her work approaches creative access practices through a research-creation curatorial lens that seeks to explore the potential to nurture liberatory re-imaginings of artistic practice, experience, and ecologies.
Moriah Crocker
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisors: Dr. Erin Sutherland and Dr. Natalie Loveless
Moriah Crocker’s research is focused on craft and labour, with a special interest in artists who highlight both the care involved in creating art, and the everyday objects that surround us. Moriah uses time and documentation to make visible the previously unseen labour of crafting. Her own beadwork practice investigates how the perception and value of objects change, and are up for negotiation as the labour of the artist becomes focal. She is currently a SSHRC Master’s Fellow.
Skye Haggerty
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisors: Dr. Betsy Boone and Dr. Natalie Loveless
Skye Haggerty’s research interests are Indigenous material cultures, visual representations of land and “nature,” and needleworking. Their current work focuses on counter-beading as a creative act of resistance that complicates and visually disrupts the linear narratives of colonial borders and maps. Research-creation and methodologies emphasizing a “knowing-through-doing” perspective are central to their working method, as are principles of reciprocity in learning.
Simone Halliday-Shaw
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Betsy Boone
Simone Halliday-Shaw’s research looks at the history of the “bird guide,” from Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds in the late eighteenth century to the contemporary moment. Her project is supported by books and prints housed in the UofA’s Bruce Peel Special Collections library and the Art Gallery of Alberta.
Niloufar Jamali
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Niloufar Jamali’s research examines the depiction of women in Iranian revolutionary art. By exploring myths, folklore, motifs, and symbols linked to them, she analyzes how these images preserve cultural memory, inspire collective resistance, and influence political history, revealing the enduring power of visual art in shaping identity and social change.
Justine Kohleal
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Natalie Loveless
Justine Kohleal specializes in theories and practices related to contemporary art, museum studies, and boredom. Her research explores post-industrial infrastructures across North America and Europe that have been transformed into centres for art, culture, and entertainment, paying close attention to the problems of embodiment posed by their neoliberalization. Kohleal’s doctoral project utilizes curatorial strategies to ask whether artworks that embody a generative boredom, such as those associated with stillness, slowness, and repetition, may ‘glitch’ such infrastructures and provide the means for thinking art spaces differently. In this way, her interdisciplinary dissertation aims to provide avenues for reimagining the contemporary art gallery on both ideological and practical levels. Kohleal received her MFA from OCAD University in Criticism and Curatorial Studies and previously worked as a curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.
Lexi Kringle
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Erin Sutherland
Wei Lu
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Wei Lu’s research focuses on contemporary Chinese women’s art and design, with an emphasis on ecofeminism, material culture, and socially engaged creative practices. Her work examines how artists navigate intersections of feminism, ecological thinking, and urban transformation, exploring how culturally-specific artistic practices can expand global conversations about gender, ecology, and material agency. She is currently a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.
Kayla-Mae Matthew
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lianne McTavish
Kayla Matthew studies paintings, sketches, and prints that are housed in rural Alberta museums. Such artworks are often steeped in colonial narratives which have yet to be recontextualized. Kayla explores historical archives to determine how an artist’s identity can relate to contemporary museum visitors’ varied identities. This allows her to curate new displays and interpretive texts that are accessible and aid in further decolonizing museum spaces. She is currently a SSHRC Master’s Fellow.
Hugo Plazas
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Betsy Boone
Hugo Plazas is working on the intersection of nationhood and racial organization in Colombian costumbrista painting, defined as paintings of people engaged in everyday life, created by local and travelling artists between 1810 and 1886. Most of the images he is studying are found in museum collections in London and Bogotá.
Ashna Rana
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Andrea Korda
Ashna Rana’s main interest lies in late Victorian art, particularly Pre-Raphaelite photography, between the 1860s to early 1900s. She is keen to explore the understanding of morality as illustrated through images of childhood and other visual topics, including the medievalism of late Victorian art and photography. Her research delves into the literary and historical references in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll, among others, while exploring the influences of Italian culture on nineteenth-century British art.
Avelina Rathbone
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Natalie Loveless
Sam Rittwage Scott
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Walter Davis
Sam Rittwage Scott’s research is centered on the cultural interchange and development of Japanese art within Canada, focusing on the inheritance and preservation of Japanese pre-modern visual phenomena after World War II. He considers the cultural loss that was faced during the Japanese internment in Alberta, and the post-war efforts of Japanese communities to restore and retain Japanese visual identity.
Mingxin Ruan
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Mingxin Ruan is writing a thesis about socially engaged art and design in the Digua Community in Beijing––a community of migrant labourers who dwell underground, in bomb shelters transformed into housing. Her research focuses on how sundry social groups, especially marginalized ones, participate in and promote open and equal dialogue and connect with community through co-design and participatory art projects.
Lucia Xun Wang
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Lucia Xun Wang researches contemporary calligraphy in the context of performance art. She examines how artists transform the theoretical mind-body relationship into physical action and use nontraditional media to question conventions of legibility, gender, and cultural authority. Her work highlights how material, gesture, and the body contribute to redefining calligraphy while preserving its cultural significance.
Amy Weber
MA, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Amy Weber’s research explores contemporary South Korean art through an ecofeminist lens. In her MA thesis, she investigates how the material of earth is used by contemporary woman artists in a variety of ways. By centring engagement with natural materials and the embodied experience created in both the artist and the viewer, Amy’s research focuses on creating an increased ecological consciousness. She is currently a SSHRC Master’s Fellow.
Qi Zhang
PhD, History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture
Advisor: Dr. Lisa Claypool
Qi Zhang’s dissertation reconstructs the Chinese Independent Art Association by uncovering overlooked Guangzhou archives and Zhao Shou’s lifelong surrealist oeuvre. It traces how Chinese students returning from Japan adopted European Surrealism, highlighting regional agency and challenging centre-periphery narratives of modernism. The project emphasises cross-cultural exchange and new interpretations through deep archival research.
Department of Art & Design
3-98 Fine Arts Building
海角社区 Campus
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2C9
Office Hours:
Monday–Friday
(closed on stat holidays)
9:00 am to 3:00 pm
Closed from 12:00–1:00 pm.
Visit our Contact Us page.