Colton Klein

Colton Klein is a PhD student in the History of Art and a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities, who studies the art of the United States with research interests in material and environmental histories. He guest curated the exhibition The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans (2025) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which built upon his article “The Turpentine State: Minnie Evans and North Carolina Ecologies” that won First Prize at the 48th Annual Symposium at The Cleveland Museum of Art and was published in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s American Art journal (Spring 2024). 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).

At Yale, Colton works as the graduate coordinator for the Environmental Humanities. He serves on the Environmental Humanities Steering Committee and Graduate Student Advisory Council, as well as two university advisory groups that report to the president: the Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement (CARE) and the Committee on Addressing the Legacy of Slavery (CALS). 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. He recently earned a certificate as a member of the 2024–25 cohort of the Yale Career Development Leaders Program (CDLP), which provides student leaders with training in inclusive leadership, communication strategies, project management, and navigating change in an institution or industry.

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 sponsored by the Bates College Museum of Art.