Kedra Kearis

Biography

Kedra Kearis oversees Winterthur's art and visual culture collection, which includes paintings, prints and maps, works on paper, and sculpture. Her scholarship explores the visual and material culture of the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By investigating a wide range of media, Kearis' work examines the intersections of performance, identity, and modernization in the material culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her close readings of built environments and furniture, fashion and photography, and painting—especially portraits—reveal associative and performative constructs.

Formerly a Senior Instructor at the Barnes Foundation, Kearis has taught a range of object-based courses in the university and museum settings. Topics have included: portraits and fashion, landscape painting in the nineteenth century, the body and the senses. Prior to pursuing a career in museums, she taught French language and literature for nearly ten years.

Kearis has received grants and fellowships in support of her research from Association of Historians of American Art, New-York Historical, The Preservation Society of Newport County, and the Edward Maverick Fund of the New York Community Trust / American Friends of Attingham.

Education

• Ph.D.  Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University (Art History)
• M.A. Eastern Michigan University (Literature)
• B.A. Oakland University (French Language and Literature, Art History)

Select Publications

• “The Desire to Create: Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s Memoirs and Rewriting an Artistic Legacy,” in Chronicling Lost Legacies: Women Collectors, Patrons, and Tastemakers, eds. Margaret Laster and Samantha Deutch (Brill, 2026).
• ‘Her Own Room Will Be a Picture’: Alva Vanderbilt’s Bedroom à la Pompadour at Marble House (1892) by Jules Allard et Fils, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (Spring 2024)
• Review of Gustave Caillebotte, Painter and Patron of Impressionism, by Ralph Gleis, ed. Gleis, Ralph, ed. Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 49. 1-2, 2020.
• Artist Catalog Essays, — Mia Culbertson, Bridget K. Rogers, Kelsie Tyson, in Intersections 2020 Tyler School of Art and Architecture, 2020

Select Exhibitions

• The Peale Painters: Global Perspectives in the Winterthur Collection (2024-2025)