The Advisory Council is comprised of distinguished professionals across diverse disciplines whose knowledge and expertise have contributed to the formation of this program. They will assist in the recommendation and selection of outside advisors to serve each dissertation. 

David Campbell, PhD
Professor of Physics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering and former Provost, Boston University

Roy Campbell, PhD
Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

John Carlin, PhD
Author, television producer, and record producer. Founder of Funny Garbage, one of the first digital design companies in New York, and The Red Hot Organization, one of the first major AIDS charities. He teaches entertainment law at Columbia Law School.

Anjan Chatterjee, MD
Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture, University of Pennsylvania. Director of Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics and author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

Thomas "Thom" Collins
Executive Director and President of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. An innovative museum director who previously led the Pérez Art Museum in Miami (PAMM) where he oversaw construction of their Herzog & de Meuron–designed building. He has contributed to many exhibition catalogues and curated exhibitions at other important museums where he has taken leadership roles. At the Barnes he returned to Herzog & de Meuron as he developed the unique Calder Gardens across the Benjamin Franklin Parkway from the Barnes (open September 2025). At the Barnes he continues to oversee a remarkable run of exhibitions and programs.

Jack Flam, PhD
President Emeritus of the Dedalus Foundation and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Kathleen A. Foster, PhD
The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art, and Director, Center for American Art. Curator and art historian, she has published on nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Andrew Wyeth; most recently, she organized the exhibition and catalogue American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., PhD
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University; recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award as well as an Emmy and a Peabody Award for his television series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

Kevin Hamilton
Dean of the College of Fine + Applied Arts and Professor of New Media, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; co-author of Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War

Hannah B Higgins, PhD
A Professor and founding Director of the interdisciplinary BA in IDEAS at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books include Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002), The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and the co-edited anthology Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012).

Emilia Kabakov
Artist, NY. A pioneer, with Ilya Kabakov, of installation art, with recent retrospectives at the Guggenhiem Museum in NY, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and the Tate Modern in London

William Kinderman, PhD
Leon M. Klein and Elaine Krown Klein Chair of Performance Studies in the Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles. A leading authority on Beethoven and internationally known pianist, scholar and recording artist, he has received a lifetime achievement award from the Humboldt Foundation. He has published a dozen books, including Beethoven, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag, and studies of Mozart and Wagner.

Cynthia Oliver, PhD
Professor of Dance, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; choreographer of Virago-Man, in the 2017 BAM Next Wave Series and currently touring.

Larry Silver, PhD
Larry Silver is Farquhar Professor of Art History, emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania and past President of the College Art Association.  He specializes in Northern Old Master painting and graphics and his books include Peasant Scenes and Landscapes (Penn 2006), Marketing Maximilian (Princeton, 2008), and Jewish Art: A Modern History (2011, with Samantha Baskind).

Fred Tomaselli
Artist, NY; best known for detailed paintings of birds, plants, and transparent human forms in a combination of unorthodox materials, and for his fantastical reimaginings of the pictures on the front page of the New York Times; represented by James Cohan Gallery and White Cube in London, with solo exhibitions in New York at the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum

Deborah Willis, PhD
UArts BFA '75 (Photography); Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University; she is an artist, photographer, curator, photo historian, and author. Willis is also a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award, among many other accolades.

Zhang Xiaogang
Artist, Beijing; one of the leading painters of the first generation of artists to emerge in China after the Cultural Revolution and an artist of global influence

Semir Zeki, PhD
Professor of Neurobiology and Neuroesthetics at University College London and FMedSci Fellow of the Royal Society