Rebecca Yuste
Rebecca entered Columbia’s PhD program in the Fall of 2019. Her dissertation, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Designing Nature in Enlightenment Mexico” is advised by Prof. Barry Bergdoll. In it, she examines how the natural world was theorized, represented, and constructed, tracing the entangled relationship between environment, science and art in the Enlightenment Americas.
Rebecca has held internships at the Princeton University Art Museum, the Norman Foster Foundation and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2021, she served as the Writer in Residence at the Institute for Studies on Latin America Art (ISLAA), where she worked with the Cesar Paternosto Archive. In 2022-2023 she was the Rockefeller Brothers Curatorial Fellow at the Hispanic Society of America. Her research has been supported by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, the Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She has presented at the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference (2024, 2025), the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art Graduate Conference (2024), and the Cambridge-Columbia Symposium (2023, 2024), where she also served as student coordinator. Her research has been published by ISLAA and the Museum of Modern Art, and she has an essay forthcoming in West 86th. Rebecca holds an A.B magna cum laude in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University, where she won the Frederick Barnard White Prize in Architecture.