
PhD Candidate, Art History
Fields of Interest
Education
Biography
I am a doctoral candidate in Art History and hold a certificate in Disability Studies. My dissertation, titled (Dis)ability and the Making of the Early Modern Artist, operates at the intersection of art history and disability studies, aspiring toward a fuller understanding of the early modern (dis)ability experience by acknowledging pain and disempowerment but also resistance and gain, to disrupt historical stereotypes about disability. By considering the corporeality of early modern artists with the methodology offered by disability studies and affect theory, I recenter the artists' bodies to reveal their role in constituting their identities and deconstructing the binary of disabled and non-disabled experiences to expose the productive power of disability in defining the processes and conceptualization of artmaking and self. Before joining the University of Washington, I gained museum and public-facing cultural work experience from the Negev Museum of Art in Beer-Sheva, the Ilana Goor Museum in Jaffa, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
I am a co-founder and organizer of the Dismantling the Canon Graduate Research Cluster. My service experience at UW includes the School of Arts' Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee (DEIA) and the Arts and Sciences Advisory Council for Students (ASACS), which advises the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. While at UW, I was selected as a recipient of several awards, including the national AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship and the UW Presidential Dissertation Fellowship. I have presented my research at several conferences, including the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting.
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Selected Research
- Or Vallah. "(Dis)ability and the Making of the Early Modern Artist." PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, in progress.
- "’Morto per l'arte:’ Early Modern Artists as Enabled Makers,” What's New About Renaissance Florence? RSA, Online, December 1, 2022.
- Or Vallah. "Nanni di Banco’s Assumption of the Virgin relief and its lost silk girdle." Presented at the Annual Meeting of The Renaissance Society of America, New Orleans, 2018.
- Or Vallah. "Unraveling the Knot: Filippo Lippi's The Feast of Herod as an expression of the conflict between Prato and Florence." Presented at the 9th Biennial ACIS Conference, Monash University Prato Centre, July 2017.
- Or Vallah. "The Invention of Death," in Portraits of Cain: Representation of Others in Israeli Contemporary Art (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2012): 134–138.
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Winter 2024
Winter 2023
Autumn 2022
Winter 2022
Additional CoursesAdditional Courses
SPRING 2023
Spring 2021
Autumn 2020
Autumn 2019
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Professional AffiliationsRenaissance Society of America (RSA); College Art Association (CAA); Disability History Association; The Israeli Association for Visual Culture in Middle Ages and Early Modern Periods (IMAGO); The Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH); American Association of University Women (AAUW)