Colton Klein

Colton Klein is a PhD student in the History of Art and a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities at Yale University, where he studies the visual culture of the United States with research interests in material and environmental histories. His recent essay on recast metal, photography, and disability in Civil War memory was awarded the 2024 Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation Prize by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) in collaboration with the Dahesh Museum of Art. His article “The Turpentine State: Minnie Evans and North Carolina Ecologies,” which won First Prize at the 48th Annual Symposium at The Cleveland Museum of Art, was published in the Spring 2024 issue of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s American Art journal.

At Yale, Colton serves on the Environmental Humanities Steering Committee and Graduate Student Advisory Council, the Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement, and the Committee on Addressing the Legacy of Slavery. He has also held elected positions on the Executive Board of the Graduate Student Assembly, where he is currently the Director of the Conference Travel Fellowship, and in the Graduate & Professional Student Senate. Before Yale, he worked as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he collaborated on the exhibitions Henry Taylor: B Side (2023–24), Edward Hopper’s New York (2022–23), At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism (2022–23), and Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930–1950 (2021–22) and as the project manager of the Marsden Hartley catalogue raisonné.