On April 2, Austėja Mackelaitė will join the Morgan as Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints responsible for the Northern European drawings and prints from 1400-1900. Along with her colleagues in the department of Drawings and Prints, led by John Marciari, Austėja will be an integral part of the team that plans the annual program for the Drawing Institute, a research center for the study of drawings at the Morgan. Also in her purview will be drawings in major American private collections that are promised gifts to the Morgan.
A native of Lithuania, Austėja received an MSt in the history of art from the University of Oxford and is currently completing a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Since September 2016, she has served as the inaugural Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated “The Art of Drawing in the Early Dutch Golden Age, 1590-1630: Selected Works from the Abrams Collection.” Previously, she was the Michael Bromberg Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, and the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation Curatorial Intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her doctoral research focuses on Netherlandish draftsmen in Rome during the sixteenth century and has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British School at Rome, where she was a Rome Scholar in 2014-15.