2022 Alumni in the Art World Luncheon

Presented by the Student Advisory Board of the Princeton University Art Museum

Friday, May 20, 12–1:30 p.m.

Chancellor Green Cafe

Presenters:

Alexis Branagan ’11, Performing Artist and Arts Administrator 

Alexis Branagan is a performing artist and arts administrator. She received her degree in English with an emphasis on theater studies and dance from Princeton University, where she was also the founding artistic director of Princeton University Ballet. She has danced primarily with New York Theatre Ballet and has also performed with Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance, Armitage GONE! Dance, Susan Marshall and Dancers, and the New Jersey Ballet. She has performed works by Sir Richard Alston, Sir Frederick Ashton, Merce Cunningham, Agnes de Mille, Clove Galilee, Liza Genaro, Jennifer Goggans, Robert LaFosse, Martin Lawrence, José Límon, Donald Mahler, Keith Michael, Jerome Robbins, Pam Tanowitz, Antony Tudor, and William Whitener. She has also danced in opera productions, in productions of Shakespeare in the Park by the Public Theater, at Carnegie Hall with the NY Pops for holiday and Broadway hits concerts, and for television.

Alexis is the manager of the School of American Ballet’s Ballet Connoisseurship program, a seminar series that expands the official school of New York City Ballet’s educational reach to include adults. She curates discussions and lecture-demonstrations that bring expert historians and stars of dance, music, Broadway, and the visual arts together in discussion in order to bring patrons an enhanced understanding and appreciation of what happens in the studio and on the stage. Alexis is also the marketing manager for Literature to Life, a performance-based literacy program that presents professionally staged adaptations of literary classics by Americans of diverse backgrounds. She has also worked as a talks and panels programmer for the 92nd Street Y Continuing Education department and has held various leadership roles in marketing and PR for American Repertory Ballet and Princeton Ballet School.

Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen ’76, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alice is the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She received an MA from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture/University of Delaware, and started her career at the Metropolitan Museum as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow.  Since then Frelinghuysen has curated, published, and lectured widely on American ceramics, glass, stained glass, and late nineteenth-century furniture, as well as all aspects of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. In 2016 she was the Clarice Smith Distinguished Scholar Lecturer, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and in 2014 she was awarded the Frederic E. Church Award for contributions to American culture. Her two most recent books, published this past fall, are Gifts from the Fire: American Ceramics, 1880–1950, Works from the Collection of Martin Eidelberg, coauthored with Martin Eidelberg *60, and Stained-Glass Windows of St. Andrew’s Dune Church. Frelinghuysen is a member of a number of professional advisory committees and serves on the board of the Shelburne Museum, as trustee emerita of the American Ceramic Circle and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, and honorary member of the Advisory Council of the Princeton University Art Museum. She is married to George ’73, has two sons, Henry ’10 and Russell, and two baby grandsons.

Mairead Horton ’17, Independent Scholar 

Mairead has worked as an intern in curatorial departments at the Huntington Library, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Princeton University Art Museum, and as the curatorial assistant in prints and drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art. She was most recently an intern in the department of old master prints at the National Gallery of Art. She is currently looking for a museum job in her new home of Chicago. After studying art history at Princeton, Mairead received her MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2020.

Erik Neil ’86, Director, Chrysler Museum of Art

Erik Neil became the director of the Chrysler Museum of Art in 2014. He has been running museums since 1999, when he started as the director of the Newcomb Art Gallery of Tulane University. He has also been the director of the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland, and the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York. He grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and earned a BA in history from Princeton and his MA and PhD in art history from Harvard University. He is a member of the 2003 class from the Getty Leadership Institute. As a curator he has worked closely with contemporary artists such as James Turrell, Carrie Mae Weems, Tony Oursler, and Jacqueline Humphries, among others. He has also curated exhibitions related to the history of American architecture, including Long Island Moderns and Thomas Jefferson, Architect. As a scholar he has published extensively on the history of architecture in Sicily; he also has a strong interest in photography. Since coming to Norfolk, Erik has focused new attention on the Chrysler’s core activities, including exhibitions, public programs, and community outreach. He has achieved considerable success in positioning the Chrysler as an organizing institution for such major traveling exhibitions as Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful (in partnership with the Columbus Museum of Art) and the upcoming Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club (in partnership with the New Orleans Museum of Art). He is currently leading a $50 million capital campaign for a museum expansion and new endowment. Erik is married to the artist Luisa Adelfio, and they have four daughters ranging in age from twenty to thirty.

Matthew Storrie *12, Project Director, Adjaye Associates 

Since joining Adjaye Associates, Matthew has become an integral member of the New York team, leading some of the firm’s key projects at a variety of scales. Overseeing projects in both civic and urban contexts, he has gained a unique experience tailored to the sensitivities of art within university campus design and intervention. 

Currently, Matthew is project director for the Princeton University Museum of Art renovation and expansion. He played a lead role in the delivery of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery, an intimate 3,100-square-foot gallery at Harvard University that involved a complete fit-out. He also developed concept work for the Studio Museum in Harlem and has significant experience with urban and campus work across multiple scales, having led numerous planning projects in San Francisco and Accra, Ghana. 

Amy S. Weisser ’86, Deputy Director, Strategic Planning and Projects, Storm King Art Center 

Amy Weisser is deputy director, strategic planning and projects at Storm King Art Center, where she incubates projects focused on the institution’s strategic growth. Weisser has spent twenty-five years supporting cultural institutions undergoing profound development. Prior to joining Storm King, Weisser launched the exhibition program for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, led exhibition development for the National September 11 Memorial Museum from 2005 to 2017, and helped open the contemporary art museum Dia:Beacon and the American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center for Earth and Space. She has taught museum studies at New York University. Weisser holds a doctorate in art history from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree in art and archaeology from Princeton, Class of 1986.