GFAA Judges
The GFAA Jury is comprised of these highly-esteemed art professionals, committed to the future of the Global Fine Art Awards program and its mission.
- Savita Apte, Art historian and lecturer specialising in Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art
- Dr. James M. Bradburne, Director General of the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Biblioteca Braidense, Milan
- Gina Costa, Art historian and curator, Director for marketing and public relations at the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, previously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago
- Dr. Joe Lin-Hill, Deputy Director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
- Dean Phelus, American Alliance of Museum’s Senior Director of Leadership Programs
GFAA Judges Bios
Savita Apte, GFAA Judge
Savita Apte is an Art Historian specialising in Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art and has been actively involved in South Asian art since 1989. She holds a postgraduate diploma in Asian Art and a Masters in Post War and Contemporary Art and her doctoral thesis is on the Progressive Artists Group and Modernism in India. In 1995 she joined Sotheby’s as their consultant expert for Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art, for their auctions in London and New York and was instrumental in setting up the Sotheby’s Prize for contemporary Indian art. In 2009, she was the co respondent for the 53rd Venice Biennale, responsible for curating South Asian and Middle Eastern artists at the Arsenale. Also in 2009 she was an associate of the Serpentine Gallery for the show Indian Highway that toured around Europe and China.
Since then Apte has successfully forged a career bridging her interests in academic research with art business. She co founded Asal Partners and Platform Projects, each of which advanced research based art and its audiences. She is a founder director of Art Dubai and is on the advisory board of the Asia Art Archive, AlSerkal Avenue and Para Site; in addition to being on the board of Khoj. She has previously served on the board of Art and Business, UK. In 2009 Apte formulated The Abraaj Group Art Prize, which helped focus international attention on art production, curation and art writing from the MENASA region. Until 2016 she served as the Chair of the Prize overseeing the commissions whilst also expanding and documenting the corporate collection.
Apte regularly lectures on South Asian art history, postcolonial modernisms and the market at Sotheby’s Institute London, SOAS and Oxford University OUDCE and Singapore. She has two forthcoming publications on the subject. She contributes regularly to academic journals and has been invited as a guest curator for a number of international exhibitions.
Dr. James M. Bradburne, GFAA Judge
Dr. James M. Bradburne is an Anglo-Canadian architect, designer and museologist, and has designed world expo pavilions, science parks and international art exhibitions.
He was educated in Canada and in England, graduating in architecture at the Architectural Association and receiving his doctorate in museology from the University of Amsterdam.
Over the past thirty years he has produced exhibitions and organised research projects and conferences for UNESCO, national governments, private foundations and museums in many parts of the world.
From 2006 until March 2015 was the director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, and since October 2015 is Director General of the Pinacoteca di Brera and the Biblioteca Braidense in Milan.
He is also one of the founders of Circles Squared, an American non-profit foundation dedicated to educational innovation in museums.
Gina Costa, GFAA Judge
Gina Costa is an art historian, museum professional, and independent curator and scholar with nearly thirty years of experience sharing her deep passion with the art world.
Currently the Director for marketing and public relations at the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Gina has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, The Art Institute of Chicago; The Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester NY; and has taught art history at a variety of universities in the United States.
She is an internationally-known, award-winning, published photographer. Her work has been exhibited in museums and art galleries across the United States and Europe, and has been also featured on a variety of websites and publications.
Gina also serves as the Midwest board representative for the marketing and public relations committee of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM).
Raised and educated partially in Europe, Gina speaks many languages and has deep experience working with European curators and art institutions and organizations. She completed her graduate work at the University of Chicago with an MA in Italian Renaissance sculpture, although she now finds herself writing, curating, and teaching contemporary art and photography, as well as 20th century Mexican art.
Dr. Joe Martin Lin-Hill, PhD, GFAA Judge
Dr. Joe Lin-Hill is currently Deputy Director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. He received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2013; his dissertation, Becoming Global: Contemporary Art Worlds in the Age of the Biennials Boom, completed under the direction of Robert Storr, considers the global proliferation of large-scale international contemporary art exhibitions since the mid-1980s and the impact they have had upon the contemporary art world. At the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, he has organized the large-scale exhibition Screen Play: Life in an Animated World (June – September 2015), which was the first international survey of artists’ use of animation in contemporary art.
Lin-Hill’s academic and curatorial work is directly tied to his diverse professional experience. He served on Rob Storr’s curatorial support team for the 2007 Venice Biennale, and from 2005 to 2008, he was the principal consultant to Sotheby’s New York office as the company launched the Pan-Asian contemporary art sales that internationalized the Chinese contemporary art market. Lin-Hill has also worked in the New York offices of AEA Consulting, one of the world’s leading cultural consulting firms, and with a broad range of flagship cultural institutions and funding organizations.
Dean Phelus, GFAA Judge
Dean Phelus is the Senior Director of Leadership Programs at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM).
In this capacity he oversees the editorial content for Museum magazine and a portfolio of programs and activities globally that foster a deeper understanding on best practices in museum programs and operations and the invaluable contribution museums make to society.
Prior to this position, he served for over a decade as director of the AAM annual meeting and professional development where he provided direction and oversight of the AAM annual meeting–the largest museum convening in the world, attracting 5,000-6,000 museum professionals from over 50 countries, and offering multilingual educational content in Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish—and other face-to-face and virtual professional development programs to strengthen core competencies in museum practice.
In his tenure he has had extensive exposure to numerous exhibitions in the US and around the world which have informed his thinking on exhibitions and the visitor experience.
He received a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in public administration from the American University in Washington, DC.
Peter Trippi, GFAA Advisory Board 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 is now co-curating 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 will travel to several additional locations. In 2013, Trippi completed 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.