Educator Open House “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis”

About the Speakers

Kristen Anthony is the assistant curator for special projects at The Huntington. An award-winning speaker and researcher, she is devoted to furthering public knowledge of key environmental issues and their history. Her research interests are in art and visual history, as well as cultural, environmental, oceanic, coastal, and maritime history.

Melinda McCurdy, curator of British art at The Huntington, received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She curates exhibitions and writes and lectures on historical British and European art from an interdisciplinary perspective, examining the political and social forces that shape visual culture of the past. Much of her work at The Huntington has focused on its world-renowned collection of 18th-century British portraiture, including Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. McCurdy is a firm believer in the relevance of the humanities beyond academia, and many of her projects emphasize the meanings and continuities of the historical in contemporary life.

Karla Nielsen, senior curator of literary collections at The Huntington, stewards the Library’s archival and print holdings in literature, publishing, journalism, and the performing arts. Before joining The Huntington in 2018, Nielsen worked as curator of literature in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University, where she had an affiliate appointment in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She obtained her doctorate in comparative literature (Spanish, Latin, Arabic) from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MSLIS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has worked as an editor for academic and small press publishers, experience that continues to inform her scholarly interests in publishing studies, the interrelatedness of literary form and material format, visual poetics, and the long history of the novel. At The Huntington, she curated the exhibitions “Mapping Fiction” in 2022 and “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” in 2024.