Gail Stavitsky is an experienced Chief Curator with a demonstrated history of working in art museums. She specializes in American Modernism and is responsible for the care, preservation and programming of the Montclair Art Museum's exhibitions and permanent collection, which encompass American art from the 18th century to the present.
Diane P. Fischer has spent her career combining museum work, teaching, and art consulting. She received a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York majoring in American Art and minoring in the History of Photography. Her dissertation was later published in both English and French as a multi-authored catalogue for the exhibition Paris 1900: The “American School” at the Universal Exposition (1999 – 2001). This major exhibition, which she organized as a curator at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, traveled to four venues, including the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. Some of her other many other publications include essays in Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg (2008) and The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism (2005).
Twig Johnson received his Ph.D. in ecological anthropology from Columbia University, doing fieldwork among small scale fishermen in Portugal, Brazil and Anegada (BVI). He has participated in many international sustainable development negotiations as a member of US, UN or NGO delegations. He is currently on leave from the Policy and Global Affairs Division of the National Academy of Science where he developed a Science for Sustainability Initiative. He likes to spend quality time with people he cares about, ideally on or next to the sea, and was recently sworn in as Assistant Harbormaster and Deputy Shellfish Commissioner of Kingston, Massachusetts.
Mary Birmingham is Curator of the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Born in the suburbs of Boston, Birmingham moved to New Jersey with her family as a teenager. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from Seton Hall University, New Jersey before moving to New York City to attend New York University for graduate school, though she subsequently dropped out to begin work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Birmingham paused her career in order to start a family back in New Jersey, but ten years later she enrolled at Hunter College to complete her graduate Art History degree. She became active in the art world again by writing, curating independently, and teaching adjunct class at Montclair State University and Kean University before taking on a position in the curatorial department at the Montclair Art Museum. Birmingham worked at the museum for nine years before moving on to the Hunterdon Art Museum and then the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in 2011.
