Sarah Russell

Sarah studies early modern Spain and its broad sphere of influence in Europe and the Americas, focusing especially on brushwork, naturalism, and the intellectual culture surrounding the art of painting. She earned a B.A. in Art History and Spanish from the University of Virginia, where her Distinguished Majors Program thesis, "Velázquez and the Demystification of Myth" won the Lindner center Prize for the Best Undergraduate Thesis in Art History. Before coming to Columbia, she taught English in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain with a Fulbright grant. Sarah has been involved in the Art History department as a student coordinator for the New York Renaissance Consortium and the Bettman Lecture Series (2020-2022), and was a GSAS Teaching Fellow (2022-2023). Currently, she works as an advisor in the Office for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships and is writing a dissertation on the concepts of deception and undeception in early modern Spanish painting.