Emerging Curator Program

Rebecca Cross

As the owner and director of Cross MacKenzie Gallery from 2006 - 2022, Cross presented nearly 300 artists in over 150 art exhibitions, and art fairs in NYC, LA and Venice Italy. She was a guest curator for the American University Art Museum at the Katzen Center - “MORE CLAY- The Power of Repetition” and curated “Macho the Mask of Masculinity” for DCAC. Post college, while living in a coffee bean warehouse in Wapping, London, she assisted renowned sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro and taught part-time at Southwark College. Her early studio practice featured solo painting shows at Addison Ripley Gallery, DC, group shows including “Hypercolorism” at Gallery D’este in NYC and commissioned work for hotels and restaurants. She designed sets and costumes for Bresee Danskompani’s “Unstill Lives” performed in Oslo and the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre, and for City Ballet of Boston’s “Urban Nutcracker” by Tony Williams, now in its 25th year.   A MacDowell Fellow, Cross’ public collections include the Washington Convention Center, Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery and the US State Department. Her ceramics were long sold through Barney’s New York, Costa Mesa and Japan. Cross has participated as a juror, lecturer or panelist for multiple arts organizations including The Smithsonian Craft Show, the Virginia AIA, Women’s Caucus for Art, Bethesda Fine Art Festival and the Washington Project for the Arts. Her awards include grants from DC Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Scandinavian American Society. She served on the board of the Renwick Alliance for Craft from 2007-2014 and is a member of the Craft Advisory Council for VisArt’s Center for Craft Studies. For more information visit www.crossmackenzie.com 

Storm Bookhard

Storm Bookhard is writer, curator, and scholar of visual culture based in Los Angeles, California. Her practice centers how artists of color and other marginalized practitioners are inscribed within archival, museological, and institutional histories. This work has included conducting research for the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI) feminist performance art initiative, authoring artist biographies for the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions (AWARE), and programming immersive performance artworks in Southern California. Bookhard also served as a collaborator on the first Los Angeles institutional exhibition highlighting the Guerrilla Girls’ 40 years of activist interventions which will open in the fall of 2025 at the GRI.

She has held positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and David Zwirner (New York) in addition to several other art institutions. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, and published by Harvard University Press and the Boston Art Review (forthcoming, 2025).

Bookhard holds a BFA in Fine Art (2022) as well as an MA in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere (2023) from the University of Southern California. She is currently the Project Manager and Curatorial Director of GĒR Collective, a performance art collaborative, as well as a Gallery Assistant at Regen Projects.