Claire Carcara

Claire Carcara is a Provost Fellow and PhD student in the Department of Art History, as well as a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She works primarily on twentieth-century art of the United States, with an emphasis on how artists engage both near and distant history, within and/or against various institutional constraints, and the ways in which works of art interpellate both individual bodies and disparate publics. She has previously held curatorial and research internships at the David & Alfred Smart Museum of Art (University of Chicago). Her writing has been published in the catalogues Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press, 2025) and Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, 1950 – Present (10 x 10 Photobooks, 2024). 

Prior to attending USC, Claire earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Boston University, where she graduated summa cum laude and with departmental honors (History of Art & Architecture).

• M.A. University of Chicago, 2023
• B.A. Boston University, 2021