PhD Candidate, Bryn Mawr College
Mechella Yezernitskaya is an art historian and curator. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College where she focuses on the wartime visual culture of the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Malevich Society and the New York Public Library. She received an MA in History of Art at Bryn Mawr College and a BA in Art History from Fordham University. She has presented her research at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Karazin University in Ukraine, Temple University, Rutgers University, the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, among others. She has assisted with the exhibition, study, and publication of modern and contemporary art at various museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she co-curated several exhibitions. In addition, she previously served as an intern assisting with research on interwar Russian and Soviet photography for the Thomas Walther Collection in the Photography and Conservation Departments at MoMA. She is currently the Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway Curatorial Fellow at the Brooklyn Museum. Her research and writing has appeared in Baltic Worlds, Oxford Art Online, ARTMargins Online, several exhibition catalogs, and is forthcoming in the edited volume Artistic Expressions and the Great War: A Hundred Years On (Peter Lang Publishing).
The 1916 album War by Olga Rozanova, made in collaboration with Aleksei Kruchenykh, draws upon the visual and linguistic vocabularies of Futurism and Suprematism to explore the trauma of war.
