GFAA Research and Nominating Committees
The GFAA Research and Nominating Committee members represent the heart and soul of the program. These talented individuals ensure the quality and expert recommendations for the GFAA Judges to review and deliberate on each year.
GFAA Research Committee
Kimberly Lin, Chair
Renee Farina
Viki Szanto
GFAA Nominating Committee
Betsie Piussan, Chair
Peter Trippi
Salwa Mikdadi
Patricia Lannes
(Emeritus) Terence Riley- Architect, former Director at MoMA New York and Miami Art Museum
(Emeritus) Tiffany Chestler- Director of Cultural Programming at DACRA and Craig Robins art collection
Peter Trippi, GFAA Nominating Committee and Judge Emeritus
Peter Trippi is Editor-in-Chief of Fine Art Connoisseur, the bimonthly magazine that serves collectors of historical and contemporary representational painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints.
He is also president of Projects in 19th-century Art, Inc., the firm he established to pursue a range of research, writing, and curating opportunities.
Trippi holds a MA from New York University in Visual Arts Administration, as well as a MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
As director of New York’s Dahesh Museum of Art, Trippi guided its renovation of the former IBM Gallery and presentation of nine exhibitions of 19th-century European art. In 2002, Phaidon Press published Trippi’s 250-page monograph J W Waterhouse, which reassesses the Victorian painter and Royal Academician best known for his Lady of Shalott at Tate Britain. Trippi went on to guest-curate the Waterhouse retrospective that appeared at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, London’s Royal Academy of Arts, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
He recently co-curated a touring exhibition about the Victorian painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, which opened in 2016 at the Fries Museum, in the artist’s Dutch native city, Leeuwarden and traveled to several additional venues, including the Leighton House in London in summer 2017.
Trippi was a two-year term as president of the nonprofit organization Historians of British Art, and then became president of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art.
In his tenure he has had extensive exposure to numerous exhibitions in the US and around the world which have informed his critical thinking on exhibition development.
Kimberly Lin, GFAA Art Research Committee Chair
Kimberly Lin received a BA in Art History with an emphasis on modern and contemporary art from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition, she has a degree in fashion design from the Los Angeles campus at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and completed the program in Post War Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s in London.
She worked at Art Network Services in Tokyo for Japanese corporate and private clients and helped to bring live art auctions to Tokyo via satellite. Currently, she is Board member of the Magical Bridge foundation in Palo Alto which has built one of the first innovative inclusive playgrounds for children in the Bay Area and helps to support and design similar projects.
A collector of art and photography, Kimberly is an active museum and gallery attendee. A native and current resident of Palo Alto, California, Kimberly previously lived with her family in New York, London and also resided in Tokyo for nine years.
Salwa Mikdadi, GFAA Nominating Committee
Salwa Mikdadi, Associate Professor, Practice of Art History, NYU Abu Dhabi, specializes in the history of modern and contemporary art of the Arab world. Prior to joining the NYUAD, Ms. Mikdadi worked at Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority where she established the professional development program for museum professionals including a customized executive program (2012 – 2014) and was a lecturer at the Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi in the postgraduate program – History of Art and Museum Studies (2010-May 2014).
Ms. Mikdadi was the Executive Director of the Arts and Culture Program at the Emirates Foundation in Abu Dhabi (2009-2012). She wrote the reference guide on the history of the twentieth-century art of West Asia, North Africa and Egypt for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline web pages and is the editor and co-editors of several publications on the subject. She conducted research in Jordan, the West Bank, UAE, Syria and Lebanon on the governance and management of museums and art institutions.
She has curated several exhibitions including the first Palestinian collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennial in 2009. She was the co-founder and director of the Cultural & Visual Arts Resource/ICWA, a non-for-profit organization dedicated to the study and exhibit of art of the Arab world in the United States (1988-2006). Mikdadi is a founding board member of the Association of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran and Turkey.
She received her B.A. from the American University of Beirut; and M.A.
Renee Farina, GFAA Art Research Committee
Renee Farina holds a Master’s degree in History of Art and History of the Art Market; Modern and Contemporary Art from Christie’s.
She received her BA in History of Art focusing on Roman History and Italian Medieval and Renaissance Art from Indiana University, Bloomington. Ms. Farina presented her Thesis on Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity and competed for an academic scholarship (Menz Award).
In Christie’s Wine Department, she was involved in sales, warehouse inventory, photography for catalogues, phone bidding, and wine connoisseurship. She completed three major projects: South and Central American Market Research, International Price Analysis, Proposal for Sales. Ms. Farina also worked in Christie’s Old Masters Department, where she worked on cataloguing, condition reports, research, photography, catalogue essay writing and inventory.
She is trilingual: Italian, Spanish and English. While at Christie’s, she translated manuscripts, served as a translator with Italian and Spanish speaker clients, translated simultaneously during meetings, and assisted with multi-lingual phone calls during auctions.
Her background also includes gallery experience; she managed the Ca D’Oro Gallery in Miami. In 2014, she opened Gallery Farina in Wynwood, which she recently sold. She is currently teaching art history in Uruguay.
Betsie Piussan, GFAA Nominating Committee Chair
A native of New York, Betsie Piussan received a B.S. Degree from Stanford University, Stanford, CA in social sciences and second concentration in French. She also studied at l’Université de Paris and l’Ecole du Louvre.
She completed her MBA at NYU Graduate School of Business. After graduating, she worked for nine years at Republic National Bank of New York, specializing in international lending.
Mrs. Piussan subsequently founded her interior design firm, Bremer Designs, after earning a Design Certificate from New York School of Interior Design. She specializes in renovations in NYC, Westchester, Connecticut and The Hamptons.
Mrs. Piussan resides in Manhattan and Southampton.
Patricia Lannes, GFAA Nominating Committee
Patricia Lannes has worked in the fields of visual literacy and museum education for over 20 years. She is the Founder and Project Director of CALTA21 (Cultures and Literacies through Art for the 21st Century,) a model initiative funded by a National Leadership grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. As Project Director, she leads all aspects of the initiative from conception to completion. CALTA21 invites adult immigrants and their families to use works of art and museums to break language barriers and build academic, social, and cultural capital. Prior to her work as Project Director of CALTA21, she was Director of Education at the Nassau County Museum of Art, and worked as an independent consultant to museums, NY school districts, institutions of higher education, and private arts organizations.
A native of Uruguay, she is the Chairperson of the Latino Network, a professional interest committee of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM).
Viktoria Szanto, GFAA Research and Marketing Committees
A native of Hungary, Ms. Szanto is a Master’s candidate in Arts and Culture Management at King’s College London. She received her BA in Art History and Comparative Literature student at the University of St. Andrews, where among other activities, she was a columnist for the school magazine and contributing writer for their art publication.
As part of her studies, she spent time abroad at Leiden University in the Netherlands, within various departments from Documentary film to Southeast Asian art.
She has volunteer and had internship experience at Christies’ London, the Scottish National Trust and St. Andrews Preservation Trust Museum.
About her future career “My dream job would entail promoting and enabling access to the arts in any form possible for audiences from different socio-economic backgrounds. For example, I really enjoyed interning as a museum educator in Hungary and a guide in Scotland, because these positions affirmed to me the importance of access and audience participation in the arts. I also like the idea of curating, but again with the emphasis on interactivity and inclusion/ education. The Global Fine Art Awards seems like an ideal project to get involved with, because it promotes diversity and recognises artists from different cultural and national backgrounds, and not just well-known artists and cultural institutions, but ones that may need support to sustain their practices.”