HNA is pleased to announce the slate of candidates for the Board, to serve a four-year term beginning at the next HNA Board meeting at the end of March 2026. There are seven candidates for the four open positions. You can find brief statements from each of the candidates below.
Members should check their email for a link to the ballot.
Voting is open immediately for active members, and will close on Thursday, March 19th, 2026. Members who do not vote online will have an opportunity to cast votes “live” at the annual members’ meeting, to be held online on Friday, March 20th, at 12:00 pm (EST) (= 5:00 PM CET for our European members; = 9:00 AM for our LA and West Coast members; = 11:00 AM Central).
Casting a vote online in advance will serve as a proxy vote, taking the place of (and waiving one’s right to) a live vote at the annual meeting.
Current Board and Officers of HNA can be viewed here. Serving on the Nominating Committee outgoing Board Members Jessica Keating, Marsely Kehoe, Lizzie Marx, and Tine Luk Meganck.
Only active HNA members are eligible to vote. To check the status of your membership, please login to your account. For any additional questions or concerns, please contact the HNA Administrator at administrator@hnanews.org. Please vote!
HNA Election 2026 Ballot
Meredith Hale
I am writing to express my interest in serving as a board member for HNA. I am currently Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture (AHVC) at the University of Exeter where I teach classes on Dutch and Flemish art and supervise doctoral students in this area. As Director of Education and Student Experience, I am responsible for the design and delivery of the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in AHVC and, in this position, I regularly chair committees and collaborate with others. As such, I would be particularly keen to serve on a subcommittee associated with education and student fellowships. As the co-convenor (together with Dr Lizzie Marx) of HNA2024, the first time in the organisation’s history the conference was held in the UK, I am also well placed to discuss issues associated with conference planning, among them organisation, locations and budgeting. I was very proud of the depth and breadth of the sessions we offered in Cambridge and am interested in continuing to support the growth of the field both in the UK and more broadly through connections across disciplinary and institutional boundaries and through the encouragement of graduate students and early career scholars.
Moorea Hall-Aquitania
I am a technical art historian and Curator of Technical Documentation at the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague. My work centers on expanding access to the RKD’s rich holdings of material-technical research and on building bridges between art history, conservation science, and digital research infrastructure. I believe this perspective can support HNA’s future programming by creating new points of connection between technical research and art-historical interpretation. Last November I defended my PhD at the University of Amsterdam as part of the NWO Down to the Ground project. My dissertation, Common Grounds: The Development, Spread, and Popularity of Coloured Grounds in the Netherlands, 1500–1650, used an interdisciplinary approach to examine the rise and rapid spread of painting on coloured grounds via the art market, contemporary art theory, artistic mobility, and pictorial effects. I also contributed as an author and editorial team member to the recent JHNA special issue, “Down to the Ground: The Impact of Colored Grounds on Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Painting,” and I am especially committed to supporting JHNA’s role in fostering dialogue between art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists. I have been involved with HNA for many years through the mentorship program and by co-organizing and speaking in technical art history– and digital humanities–focused sessions and workshops at recent conferences. As a board member, I would be eager to contribute to the work of the IDEA Committee and to support mentorship and interdisciplinary programming—such as workshops and panels that connect technical research with broader art-historical questions—drawing on my experience across academic and museum contexts on both sides of the Atlantic.
Anna Koopstra
I am a specialist in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Northern European painting, trained in the Netherlands and in the United Kingdom, with professional experience in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States. Since September 2023, I have been Curator of early Netherlandish painting at Musea Brugge in Bruges. Keen on giving back to the scholarly community from which I myself have benefited, I would look forward to contributing to the mission of HNA while demonstrating to future generations the continued, crucial importance of our field. I would bring to the Board a broad international perspective, grounded in both academic research and museum practice, and with a strong commitment to fostering dialogue between scholars on both sides of the pond. At a time when, more than ever, the field of art history is in need of sustained international networks, interdisciplinarity, collegiality and collaborative initiatives, I see HNA as uniquely positioned to fostering connections and leading in conversations on how to move forward as a discipline and as a community—with both openness to new insights and self-assuredness about its core being.
Hannah Prescott
Hannah Prescott is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, where her research focuses on the representation and global dissemination of Dutch textiles in the seventeenth century. Hannah has held pre-doctoral fellowships at the Center for Netherlandish Art (MFA Boston) and the Dutch Textile Trade Project, and curatorial internships at The Frick Collection, The Walters Art Museum, and The National Gallery of Art. As a board member for the Historians of Netherlandish Art, she would look forward to assisting in the planning of HNA’s conference and mentorship program, both of which have benefited her own professional development. She also hopes to work with other board members to facilitate HNA programming that speaks to the concerns of its graduate student and early-career members, with potential topics including: demystifying the processes of academic and curatorial job hunting, book publishing (and fundraising for publications), pursuing careers outside of the academy, and the differences between career trajectories in the U.S. and Europe.
Adam Sammut
Dr Adam Sammut FRHistS is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Department of History of Art, University of York, UK. He received his PhD from York in 2021. Dr Sammut’s dissertation, Rubens and the Dominican Church in Antwerp, was published by Brill in 2023. Previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at York, Dr Sammut was, until recently, a Year Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti. His forthcoming article about Rubens’s Mulay Ahmad (MFA Boston) has won the inaugural Burlington Magazine Prize for Research on South Netherlandish Art 1400-1800. Dr Sammut is committed to Netherlandish art as a field of academic study. He has attended every HNA conference since 2018, has supported the HNA Mentorship Program, and was the recipient of a 2021 HNA Fellowship. Since 2022, Dr Sammut has acted as the area studies representative on the Association for Low Countries Studies’ executive board. Margot Steurbaut I am a PhD candidate in Art History at Rice University and currently a visiting researcher at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp. My dissertation examines stained glass production in the Age of Rubens, reflecting a broader commitment to material and methodological diversity within Netherlandish art history. As someone working on an underrepresented art form, I am particularly attuned to the inclusion of scholars working on decorative arts and other media that have historically received less attention in the field. I bring relevant governance and service experience from my role as a graduate representative at Rice University, where I participated in faculty meetings, advocated for graduate student interests, and organized professional development workshops. I am particularly interested in contributing to HNA’s Mentorship Program, informed by my experience as an HNA mentee at a formative stage of my academic training. Active in both US and European academic contexts, I would bring an international perspective to my service on the HNA board.
Noa Turel
Noa Turel is Associate Professor and Art History Program Director at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She trained at the University of California, Santa Barbara (Ph.D.) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA). In her research, Turel focuses on the intersection of art, science, and technology. She is the author of many articles and chapters, as well as the co-editor (with Stephen Perkinson) of Picturing Death 1200-1600 (Brill 2020). Her first monograph, Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century, came out in 2020 from Yale University Press. In her current book project, Ingenious Secrets: Renaissance Images and the Invention of Technologized Europe, Turel explores the rhetoric and effects of images of technology. She is an active member of several professional organizations, and had previously chaired CAA’s International Committee. Turel has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Huntington Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.