Ellison Dunn ’27 selected to create the next senior exhibit in Sterling Memorial Library

Yale Library has selected Ellison C. Dunn as the student curator to participate in the 2026–27 Senior Exhibit Program.

The exhibition, tentatively titled “Choreographing Gender in Mid-Twentieth-Century Photography,” will follow queer culture as documented in the black-and-white photography of international artists.

“When color is stripped from an image,” Dunn wrote in her project proposal, “form is prioritized. Hence black-and-white photography lends itself to discussions of the body and of gender through form. This project dissects the ways in which a camera can both reveal and conceal inner identities.”

Dunn, a resident of Jonathan Edwards College, is an art history major, former art critic for “Yale Daily News,” and head gallery guide at the Yale University Art Gallery. She is also working toward an undergraduate certificate in Collections: Objects, Research, Society through COSMOS, a global program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Students in the program engage with Yale Library Special Collections and have opportunities to work with collections in other cultural institutions across campus.

COSMOS (Collaborations to Study Materiality and Objects) is also home to the graduate certificate program in Material Histories of the Human Record at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The co-directors of  both certificate programs are Lucy Mulroney, director for Collections, Research, and Education at Beinecke Library, and Ayesha Ramachandran, associate professor of comparative literature and chair of the program in early modern studies.

Scope of research

In early June, Dunn will begin her research in Yale Library Special Collections. Her first steps will be to explore the library’s Transgender Collection of print and magazine materials and the papers of several photographers and artists—including Paul Cadmus, Laura Bailey, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas.

Dunn will also work with supplemental materials from Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), including works by American artists Diane Arbus and Hunter Reynolds, Mexican artists Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and Graciela Iturbide, and German artists Grete Stern and Ellen Aurebach (ringl + pit studio).

In addition to her intensive on-site work at Yale, Dunn will make independent trips this summer to Chile, to research the Chilean photographer Paz Errazuriz, and to Argentina, to study the work of Stern and other artists. She will also examine Argentina’s Archivo de la Memoria Trans, which contains more than 25,000 items documenting the lives of trans people in that country.

Rachel Sperling, social science librarian, is Dunn’s librarian advisor. Judy Ditner, Richard Benson Curator of Photography and Digital Media at YUAG, is Dunn’s faculty advisor.

The Senior Exhibit Program

The library’s Senior Exhibit Program offers a rising senior hands-on training in professional-level curatorial skills. The selected student receives a $4,200 stipend to support five weeks of on-site research in Yale’s collections during the summer to lay the foundation for the exhibition. Through the research process, the student further refines the initial proposal, based on discoveries that will shape and, in some cases, refocus the final exhibition.

After the nine-month research and production period, the experience culminates in the opening of an exhibition based on the student’s senior essay topic. The exhibition opens in Sterling Memorial Library’s exhibition corridor in April of the student’s senior year and remains on view through October.  

Learn more about Yale Library’s Senior Exhibit Program.

Learn more about the undergraduate certificate program in Collections: Objects, Research, Society at the MacMillan Center. 

Learn more about the graduate certificate program in Material Histories of the Human Record at Beinecke Library.

—Deborah Cannarella

Image: Student curator Ellison Dunn ’27 (center) with faculty advisor Judy Ditner (left) and librarian advisor Rachel Sperling (right). Photo by Monica Reed