Meet the Staff

Jane R. Becker is a specialist in nineteenth-century painting and sculpture who studied art history as an undergraduate at Williams College and, for her PhD, at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She joined the department in early 2015 after holding curatorial positions at other museums, working as an independent art historian, and lecturing for The Met. Jane conducts research on the department’s nineteenth-century paintings, writes catalogue entries and information about the collection online, and administers nineteenth-century exhibitions. In addition to having contributed to Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016), she is co-curating a multi-department rotation in Drawings and Prints’ Johnson galleries for Fall 2025.

Lisa Cain coordinates the arrangements for artworks coming in and out of the department working closely with her colleagues in European Paintings, Paintings Conservation, and the offices of the Registrar and Secretary and General Counsel. She began at The Met in 2000 as an assistant registrar for special exhibitions before joining European Paintings in 2005. Prior to The Met, she worked as a registrar at the Brooklyn Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York. Lisa studied French literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 in France.

Richard Carino received his BA from Rutgers University with his major in graphic design. He worked in pharmaceutical advertising as a junior graphic designer and eventually became an art director, but the corporate setting of advertising wasn’t where he wanted to be in his career. He started working at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early nineties in the Retail department and then made his way into the security department in 2016. Richard joined the Department of European Paintings as a gallery technician in 2022.

Gillian Carver joined the Museum in July of 2022; she works with the department to coordinate the Friends of European Painting membership program as well as acting as the executive assistant to the curator-in-charge. Gillian received her BA in history of art and architecture with minors in museum studies and Africana studies and a certificate in Nonprofit Management from the University of Pittsburgh. Previously she worked at CUE Art Foundation a non-profit gallery located in Chelsea, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Homeless Children Education Fund in Pittsburgh.

Laura D. Corey received her BA from Duke University and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she specialized in nineteenth-century French art and the history of collecting and wrote her dissertation on Mary Cassatt’s role as an advisor to American collectors. She began her career at The Met as an intern in 2010 and has worked on exhibitions including Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (2013), Seurat’s Circus Sideshow (2017), and Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence (2018). She co-curated the Museum’s 150th anniversary exhibition Making The Met, 1870–2020 (2020). She now works on projects that span the curatorial areas and co-leads the Alexis Gregory Curatorial Practice Program.

Nicole DeSantis joined the department in 2020 as part of the Skylights Project renovation and the following reinstallation Look Again: European Paintings 1300–1800 (2023). She oversees the storage and care of over 2,500 works in the European Paintings permanent collection, and works closely with colleagues across the Museum to coordinate art movement related to gallery rotations, preventative conservation, and special exhibitions. Prior to European Paintings, she was an intern with the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Museum and worked for several years in a New York-based gallery specializing in sixteenth to nineteenth century Americana. She holds a BA with honors in Art History from Hunter College.

Adam Eaker studied art history at Yale and Columbia, where he received his PhD in 2016. A specialist in Northern European and British painting of the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, he previously served as an Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at the Frick Collection, where he co-curated Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture (2016). At The Met, he has curated the exhibition In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met, as well as co-curating The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England and Look Again: European Paintings 1300–1800. He is the author of Van Dyck and the Making of English Portraiture (2022) as well as a monograph on the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Gesina ter Borch (2024).

Sarah Fruehauf began at The Met in 2023 working as a Research Assistant for both the European Paintings and Drawings & Prints departments, specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German art. She received her BA in art history with a minor in German studies from New York University in 2022, where she graduated with departmental high honors. While at NYU, she worked as an archival intern at the Frick Art Reference Library and a curatorial intern at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Before joining The Met, she held positions at the Neue Galerie New York and Sotheby’s.

Alison Hokanson is a specialist in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central and Northern European and British Painting. She joined the department in 2012 and has curated and co-curated special installations and exhibitions at The Met on J. M. W. Turner, Victorian painting, Pre-Raphaelite art and design, and Rodin. She has published on a wide range of topics including nineteenth-century French drawings, Belgian Symbolism and the landscapes of Vincent van Gogh. She received her BA in art history from Brown University and MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Harrison Jackson joined the department in 2019. She catalogues Italian, French, and British Old Master Paintings and manages our Instagram page, @meteuropeanpaintings. Prior to European Paintings, she spent four years as a research assistant and collections management assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum. She holds an MA in the history of art and architecture from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University.

Francesca Marzullo joined the department in 2019 to work on exhibitions of Italian paintings. A specialist in medieval and Renaissance Italian art, she studied art history at Williams College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University, where she completed her PhD in 2020. She also received an MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge.

John McKanna has been hanging pictures in the European Paintings galleries since 1997. He holds a BA from Bennington College and a MMus from Yale University. In addition to his work at the Museum, John is also a painter and musician; his work can be viewed on his Instagram.

Jennifer Meagher joined the department in 1999. She catalogues Dutch, Flemish, German, Netherlandish, and Spanish Old Master Paintings. She has also written extensively for the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. 

Asher Miller, a specialist in nineteenth-century art, joined the department as a research assistant in 2001. He has contributed to in-gallery and editorial projects at The Met, such as Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde (2006), The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (2009), and Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016). He curated the exhibitions The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785–1850 (2013), Peder Balke: Painter of Northern Light (2017), and Delacroix (2018). A native New Yorker, Asher received his BA in history and art history from Bowdoin College and his PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

(also see the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art)

Denise, who joined The Met in January 2020, received her PhD in art history from Columbia University in 2014. She was previously the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (2014–2019), where she was the curator of the exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (October 2018–February 2019) and a co-curator of its expansion at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Le modèle noir de Gericault à Matisse (March–July 2019). Denise previously received an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked in finance and consulting. She has taught art history at Columbia University in New York and in Paris. 

Michael Plunkett joined the Museum in Spring 2024. He works closely with curators, collections managers, conservators, technicians, and administrative staff within the department and across the Museum on matters relating to the European Paintings collection. He also manages the department’s operating budget and donor funds. Previously, Michael was a Senior Director at GRIMM, overseeing the international art gallery’s New York operation. Prior to that he held various positions at the galleries Hauser & Wirth and Metro Pictures. He has a joint BA in Art History and Journalism from Rutgers University.

David Pullins is responsible for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French, Italian and Spanish painting at The Met, where he arrived in 2019 from The Frick Collection.  He studied art history at Columbia University (BA), the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA), and Harvard University (PhD).  Recent projects include Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (2023) and the forty-five reinstalled permanent collection galleries that constitute Look Again: European Paintings, 1300-1800 (2024).  His monograph The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher (Getty Research Institute: 2024) examines how an ideological privileging of painting above other media in eighteenth-century Paris continues to shape art history.

Rachel Robinson studied painting at Columbia College Chicago where she received her BA in 1997. She began working as a guard at The Met in 1999, by 2007 she became a technician for the department of Modern and Contemporary.  She joined the department in 2012, where she is currently serving as Supervising departmental technician of nineteenth-century paintings.

Rhea Stark is a PhD student at Columbia University, specializing in medieval Islamic art and its uses in nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse. Rhea holds a BA in Middle East Studies and Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University and an M.Phil in Islamic Art and Archaeology from the University of Oxford. Before beginning her PhD, Rhea was the curatorial assistant for African, Asian, and Islamic Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she worked on Africa Fashion (2023) and Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (2024). She is currently assisting with preparations for a joint exhibition between the European Paintings and Islamic Art Departments. 

Susan Alyson Stein joined the department in 1981 after a yearlong Mellon Fellowship at the Guggenheim. At The Met, she has curated/co-curated over twenty exhibitions, from Cézanne Watercolors (1988) to Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (2013), Seurat's Circus Sideshow (2017), and Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence (2018), while contributing to over fifty Museum publications devoted to artists ranging from Goya to Picasso. Her long-standing work on Van Gogh includes Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings (2005), and within the last decade, Van Gogh: Irises and Roses (2015), and Van Gogh’s Cypresses (2023).

Anna-Claire Stinebring studied art history at Oberlin College, the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her PhD in 2022. Before joining the staff of The Met, she held fellowships at the Rijksmuseum and The Met, and most recently served as Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at The Frick Collection. She curated the Frick Madison display Master Printmakers of Northern Europe: Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck (2023), and co-authored Bruegel’s Three Soldiers (with Salman Toor; Frick Diptych series; forthcoming January 2025). At The Met, she is responsible for the research, display, and growth of the collection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings from Northern Europe.

Gretchen joined the Museum in late 2021. She handles the day-to-day upkeep of the European Paintings office and manages the labels for the department. Previously, she worked as an admin and office manager at a kitchen design firm in Brooklyn and at the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute in communications design, majoring in illustration.

Stephan Wolohojian received his PhD from Harvard University and has been a curator in the department since 2015. He has held academic and museum positions, most recently at the Harvard Art Museums, where he played an active role in the institution's curatorial reorganization and the reinstallation of its permanent collections in the Renzo Piano-designed building. At The Met, he has curated the focus exhibition Velázquez Portraits: Truth in Painting (2016) and wrote the introductory essay in the Bulletin dedicated to Charles LeBrun's celebrated Everhard Jabach (1618–1695) and His Family. In addition to his responsibilities for Baroque painting, Stephan has a longstanding interest in fourteenth-century Sienese art.

Maryan Ainsworth studied at Oberlin College (BA and MA) and Yale (Ph.D.). Both Oberlin and Yale have extraordinary art museums, where Maryan first learned the importance of first-hand study of art objects. She joined The Met's staff in 1977 and has specialized in an interdisciplinary approach, combining art-historical issues with the technical examination of Northern Renaissance paintings. Her publications and exhibitions include monographic studies on Petrus Christus, Gerard David, Jan Gossart, and Pieter Coecke van Aelst, as well as The Met's early German paintings. Maryan has taught at Barnard College; as the Janson-La Palme Visiting Professor, Princeton (2017); and the Kress-Beinecke Professor, CASVA, National Gallery of Art (2018-19).

Katharine Baetjer's primary areas of interest are eighteenth-century English, French, and Venetian Old Master paintings and pastels and, secondarily, European portrait miniatures. She has also written on Klimt and Jackson Pollock at The Met and on the history and formation of the collection. A contributor to the online catalogue, she was also a longtime member of the editorial board of the Metropolitan Museum Journal.

Keith Christiansen began his career as assistant curator in 1977 and between 2009 and 2021 was the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings. In his forty-four years at the Museum, he collaborated in the organization of over twenty exhibitions on Italian, Spanish and French artists. He has taught at Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and was the Clarence and Ruth Wedgewood Kennedy Professor in Renaissance Studies at Smith College (1999) and guest professor at Vassar (2006). In addition to the many acquisitions he pursued that have enriched the Museum’s collection, he has published widely and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, conferred by the Ministry of Arts in France.