About SHERA

Officers

Svitlana Biedarieva

President

2026–27

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, artist, and curator. She specializes in Ukrainian, Eastern European, and Latin American art, with a focus on decoloniality and resistance in contemporary art practices. She is the author of the book Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (2025), the editor of the books Art in Ukraine between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (2024) and Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021 (2021), and the co-editor of At the Front Line: Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (2019). She has published texts in leading academic journals and media outlets, such as October, Daedalus, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius

President-Elect

2026–27

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius was Curator and Deputy Director of The National Museum in Warsaw, and taught art history at Birkbeck College, University of London and at Humboldt University, Berlin. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck School of Historical Studies. Her publications include Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie (Polish Academy 2000); National Museum in Warsaw Guide: Galleries and Study Collections (National Museum in Warsaw 2001); Kantor was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain (Black Dog 2011, with Natalia Zarzecka), From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (Ashgate 2015, with Piotr Piotrowski); Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to the Communist Bloc (Routledge 2021). She is a member of the steering committee of Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures, where she staged several events focusing on museums in Eastern Europe, including Ars Homoerotica: 10 Years On (2020), The Avant-Garde Museum (2022) and Mapping Ukraine in Museums (2022, sponsored by the British Council). Her current research focuses on the historiography of caricature, which extends beyond Western sources to include texts from East Central Europe, Russia, and the Near East.

Tomasz Grusiecki

Outgoing President

2026–27

Tomasz Grusiecki is Associate Professor and Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art at Queen's University. His research focuses on visual and material culture from ca. 1550 to 1750, with particular emphasis on Germanic and Slavonic Europe, while also extending into the modern period to provide a longue durée perspective on the region. His work addresses questions that connect past and present, including myths of cultural distinctiveness, cultural entanglement, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.

Kasia Jeżowska

Communications Officer

2024–27

Kasia Jeżowska is a cultural historian of modern Eastern Europe. Her research focuses on the design and material cultures of state socialism, considering their industrial, political, and social dimensions during the Cold War. More broadly, she is interested in how things are mobilized in the service of politics and intercultural exchanges and the role of state bureaucrats, designers, and architects in these processes. She is a Senior Lecturer in Design History and Theory at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Carolyn Guile

Secretary-Treasurer

2025–27

Carolyn Guile is an art and architectural historian on the faculty of Art at Colgate University where she teaches courses on early modern East-Central European arts and architecture, with an emphasis on the historical Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. She also studies the impact of armed conflict on cultural heritage, and has been advancing cultural heritage protection initiatives in Ukraine. She is the author of Remarks on Architecture: The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). Her current writing projects include a study of cultural heritage preservation in post-Partition Poland, and a collection of essays centered on Kraków.

Members-at-Large

Amy Bryzgel

2024–26

Amy Bryzgel is a Teaching Professor at Northeastern University, where she teaches courses on contemporary art, visual intelligence, and upper-level courses on Performance Art and 20th century Russian Art. Prior to this, she was a Personal Chair at the University of Aberdeen, where she worked from 2009-2022. She has authored numerous books and articles on performance art in Eastern Europe.

Ksenya Gurshtein

2024–26

Dr. Ksenya Gurshtein is an independent curator, art historian, and arts writer living in Wichita, Kansas. Her area of deepest scholarly expertise is art from socialist-era Eastern Europe; she has published a number of articles, exhibition catalogue texts, and book reviews on this topic and co-edited the book Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). She is also currently co-editing the fourth volume of the forthcoming The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe. Her work strives to foreground lesser-known histories and stories, look to places and topics that have historically been peripheral to the Western canon, and support the work of arts institutions and artists as agents of social change. Her publications can be found at https://independentscholar.academia.edu/KsenyaGurshtein

Photo: Kendra Cremin

Louise Hardiman

2024–26

Dr Louise Hardiman is a historian of Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet art and for 2024-25 is a Visiting Research Fellow at Kingston University. Her recent research and publications concern late Imperial Russian fine and decorative art, women's art, and "cold" in landscape painting; her teaching focuses on Russian art and Ukrainian art for adult learning institutions including University of Cambridge ICE. She has a Ph.D. in History of Art (University of Cambridge, 2014) and her books include Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives, co-edited with Nicola Kozicharow (2017) and Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy: Art, Material Culture and British-Russian Relations (2023), as well as two editions of folk tales by Elena Polenova.

Cosmin Minea

2024–26

Cosmin Minea is a Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) postdoctoral researcher in the Art History Department at Masaryk University in Brno and co-chair of the Environmental Humanities working group at New Europe College in Bucharest. His project in Brno is a comparison between ways in which South-East European states and regions have written their history of art and preserved their historical monuments between 1860 and 1930. His other project in Bucharest explores the relation between the historical monuments in interwar Romania and the growing interest into the exploration and preservation of the natural environment.

Olenka Z. Pevny

2024–26

Olenka Z. Pevny is University Associate Professor in Ukrainian Studies and in Medieval and Early Modern Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. She studies the art and culture of Kyivan Rus’ and Ruthenia. She is particularly interested in the reception and acculturation of the Orthodox tradition in Eastern Slavic lands and in the place of visual culture in narratives of national, regional, religious and gender identity. Her involvement in conservation and preservation initiatives guides her interest on the ways in which scholars, theorists, politicians and cultural activists in the late Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and contemporary Ukraine and Russia relate to and interact with the medieval past.

Hanna Chuchvaha

2024–26

Hanna Chuchvaha is Reviews Editor for H-Net/H-SHERA Reviews since it was launched in 2017. She is a scholar of the history of East European art, design, and visual culture with a focus on several fields, such as print culture, word and image, women art collectors, and art of trauma. She teaches at the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures (University of Calgary). Her first book, Art Periodical Culture in Late Imperial Russia (1898–1917): Print Modernism in Transition, was published by Brill in 2016. Currently she is working on a monograph devoted to women collectors and patrons in the late Russian Empire, which was awarded by SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). She is a co-editor (with Dr. Alla Myzelev, SUNY Geneseo) of the upcoming volume, Challenging Imperial Narratives through Visual Art and Material Culture in Eastern Europe and Eurasia from 1760 to the Present.