Natalie Pellolio

Natalie Pellolio is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art & Art History and the Thomas D. Dee II Graduate Fellow at the Bill Lane Center for the American West for the 2017-2018 academic year. Natalie studies American photography, with a focus on photographers working in California at the turn of the twentieth century. Her dissertation examines the historical relationship between photography and the American postal service, in which she traces the aesthetic influence of the mail on photographic practice as both forms developed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Prior to arriving at Stanford, Natalie held positions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Portland Art Museum, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Most recently, she co-curated an exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford entitled "Missing Persons," which explored absence as both a theme and aesthetic strategy for American artists working in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including works by Kara Walker, the Guerrilla Girls, Lee Friedlander, Richard Misrach, Diane Arbus, Ana Mendieta, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Sophie Calle, and Ester Hernandez, among others.