Sarah Russell, a doctoral candidate in Columbia University, joins the Meadows Museum, SMU,  for a year beginning in September 2026 as a new Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow. The fellowship will provide her with the opportunity to develop new scholarship in Spanish art on the Meadows Museum’s collections and gain professional experience in the curatorial department.

Russell earned an M.Phil. and M.A. in art history and archaeology from Columbia University and a B.A. with highest honors in art history and Spanish from the University of Virginia. Her undergraduate thesis, “Velázquez and the Demystification of Myth,” received the Lindner Center Prize for the Best Undergraduate Thesis in Art History. Supported by a Fulbright Predoctoral Research Award, she was a visiting researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She currently holds the Rudolf Wittkower Fellowship in Columbia and is curating Engaño: Art of Illusion in Early Modern Spain, an exhibition scheduled to open at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery in October 2027.

During her fellowship, she will continue developing her dissertation, The Art of Undeception in the Spanish Golden Age, while contributing to curatorial initiatives at the Meadows. The museum holds numerous works relevant to Russell’s research, focused on the visual art and intellectual culture of early modern Spain, with particular emphasis on the concepts of engaño (deception or illusion) and desengaño (the discovery of truth through recognizing deception) in 17th-century painting.

In 1962, Dallas businessman and philanthropist Algur H. Meadows donated his private collection of Spanish paintings, as well as funds to start a museum, to Southern Methodist University. The museum opened to the public in 1965, marking the first step in fulfilling Meadows’s vision to create “a small Prado for Texas.” Today, the Meadows is home to one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain. The collection spans from the 10th to the 21st centuries and includes medieval objects, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures, and major paintings by Golden Age and modern masters.