Nadiah Rivera Fellah

Since Nadiah Rivera Fellah joined the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2019, she has curated New Histories, New Futures (2021) and the exhibition by Firelei Báez for FRONT International (2022) and has cocurated Picturing Motherhood Now (2021) with Emily Liebert. Her recent acquisitions include Carmen Herrera’s Mardi Soir (1973) and Zilia Sánchez’s Troyanas (de la serie Módulos Infinitos) (1964/1993). In her previous position at the Newark Museum of Art, she curated the traveling exhibition Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth and served as the primary author and editor for the accompanying catalogue. Fellah was also tasked with integrating several Latin American works into the American galleries prior to the museum’s expansion of that wing. In 2014, she organized Left Coast: California Political Art at the James Gallery at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Prior to these projects, Fellah held curatorial positions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Fellah specializes in Latin American and global contemporary art. Her publications include Picturing Motherhood Now (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021); Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 2019); “Graciela Iturbide’s Cholo/a Series: Images of Cross-Border Identities,” in the journal History of Photography (2019); Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African American Expressionism at the Newark Museum (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 2016); and various contributions to Aperture magazine, among others. She has taught courses on curatorial practice and modern and contemporary art at the City University of New York.

Fellah received her BA in art history at Oberlin College. In 2019, she completed a PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her dissertation focused on the role of photography in capturing stories of migration in the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present and was supported in part by fellowships from the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Center for Creative Photography.

Contact the Curator at: ContemporaryArt@clevelandart.org