Dr. Petrouchka Moïse, Grinnell College
Dr. Petrouchka Moïse is an Assistant Professor and Cultural & Community-Based Digital Curator at the Grinnell College Libraries. An artist-scholar, she teaches courses on visual and material culture and curatorial studies, with a particular emphasis on the Caribbean. In her curatorial role, she develops interdisciplinary initiatives that enrich the academic and cultural life of the college community. Dr. Moïse first joined Grinnell as a 2020–24 CLIR/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow tasked with designing the Haitian Art Digital Crossroads (HADC) project. Her goal for HADC was to build a digital asset management system and public-facing platform for the Waterloo Center for the Arts’ Haitian art collection, as well as for other partner institutions, supporting their efforts to digitize and catalog their holdings.
In her research, Dr. Moïse critiques traditional provenance practices, identifying them as a source of systemic gaps in data about Haitian visual art. In response, she developed an alternative framework—“going beyond provenance™️”—that highlights the data fields and cultural contexts often missing from dominant narratives. A key goal of her work is to empower community-based documentarians who can bring new perspectives into library and archival collections. She also created the Digital Lakou™️ Sandbox, a collaborative digital toolkit designed to crowdsource metadata and map Haitian Kreyol terms central to Haitian art. The HADC Lakou integrates pedagogy and practice within a virtual space that supports interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration.
Dr. Moïse is a research fellow with the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Mellon-funded “Haitian Art + Audience-Centered Storytelling Initiative,” which aims to expand and reinterpret the museum’s Haitian art collection. She also completed a 2023–25 fellowship with the Museum of Modern Art’s Cineros Institute, “Bridging the Sacred: Spiritual Streams in Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Art, 1920–1970.” In 2025, she guided students in ARH 295, Haitian Art & Visual Culture, in curating a bilingual digital platform for the Des Moines Art Center’s exhibition The Light Within Ourselves: Haitian Art in Iowa. She also served as guest curator for Fleuve: The Revolution of Freedom and Flow at the Waterloo Center for the Arts, an exhibition that explores Haitian artistic and cultural movements through works from the Grinnell College Museum of Art’s Jacob Lawrence Toussaint Louverture series and the Waterloo Center for the Arts’ Haitian art collection.
Chawne Paige, Waterloo Center for the Arts
Chawne Paige has served as Executive Director of the Waterloo Center for the Arts since 2024, capping a long career at the institution that began in 2001. He was initially hired to lead a full rebranding of the museum and to oversee the creative development of all print and digital marketing materials, including exhibition graphics, signage, educational content, photography, and website design. In 2005, his role evolved into Digital Arts Manager, where he built a digital arts education program, taught classes, managed technology, and created training opportunities for K–12 teachers throughout the region.
Appointed Curator in 2013, Paige works closely with artists, collectors, donors, board members, and partner organizations to plan, coordinate, install, and interpret exhibitions across the museum’s eleven galleries. His curatorial work draws extensively from the museum’s Haitian and Caribbean collection, as well as its holdings in International Folk Art, Midwest art, American Regionalism, and American Decorative Arts. He organized the 2017 Haitian Art Society Conference in Waterloo, which brought together panelists from Haiti and across the United States and featured the museum’s expansive Haitian collection through eleven exhibitions. These included Birth of the Hummingbird and Other Marvels by Pascale Monnin; Uncle Fun’s Over-Stuffed Suitcases of Spectacular Haitian Art; 40 Years of Collecting; Haiti in Iowa; and Veve: Spiritual Symbols of Haiti. During his tenure as curator, he has mounted more than 25 exhibitions centered on Haitian art.
Outside his work at the museum, Paige is deeply involved in supporting and creating art in the community. He has served on the boards of the Iowa Arts Council and Experience Waterloo, and currently sits on the boards of Youth Art Team, Limelight Arts Cedar Valley, Friends of the University of Northern Iowa Permanent Art Collection, and The Gallery. In 2012, he completed an artist residency at Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts in the Bahamas and continues to exhibit his artwork throughout Iowa.
Paige earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking and graphic design, with honors, from the University of Northern Iowa. While studying in Cedar Falls, he worked as a student art director and graphic designer at the university’s Center for Educational Technology and developed strong interests in world religions, African art, and African Diaspora art histories in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Mark Christel, Grinnell College
Mark Christel is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Libraries at Grinnell College. He oversees library administration, collection development, and strategic planning for the institution’s library system. He holds a Master of Information and Library Studies (MILS) from the University of Michigan.
Darrell Taylor, Waterloo Center for the Arts
Darrell Taylor is Curator and Assistant Director at the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Waterloo, IA. His responsibilities include promoting the Center and its programming; acquiring, storing, and exhibiting collections; selecting exhibition themes and designs; organizing tours, lectures, workshops, and performances; art installation and fundraising; and conferring with the Executive Director.
From 2003 to 2023 he was the Gallery Director and Overseer of the Permanent Art Collection at the University of Northern Iowa. He served as the Gallery’s interim director two years before that appointment and taught as an adjunct instructor in art foundations. In 2005, he wrote a successful Conservation Assessment Program grant for the UNI Permanent Art Collection. In 2010, with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds, he supervised the renovation of the UNI Permanent Art Collection storage facility. And in 2015 and 2018, he wrote two successful IMLS Museums for America Collection Stewardship project grants to identify art objects for conservation and treatment.
Taylor is also an artist with B.F.A., M.A., and M.F.A. degrees in intermedia art from the University of Iowa. His performances, photographs, drawings, and collages have been presented nationally and internationally. Previous projects include Orte des Begehrens Project (1998) and Rites of Identity Project (1999), both of which were collaborations between the University of Iowa and the University of Dortmund in Germany. In 2003 and 2007, he participated in project collaborations between UNI and Herzen State University in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Dr. Fredo Rivera, Grinnell College
Art and architectural historian Fredo Rivera ’06 is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Grinnell College, where they teach courses on modern and contemporary architecture, urban visual culture, and the art of the Americas, with a particular emphasis on the Caribbean. Their current research spans modern Cuban art and architecture, Haitian art, photography and visual culture, and queer performance and visuality within the Caribbean diaspora.
Rivera completed their dissertation, “Revolutionizing Modernities: Visualizing Utopia in 1960s Havana, Cuba,” in July 2015. They previously served as an Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2011–2013). Rivera has contributed to numerous exhibition projects, including The Elusive Master: Emmanuel Merisier, from Haiti to Beyond (Little Haiti Cultural Complex); Edouard Duval-Carrié: Metamorphosis (Museum of Contemporary Art–North Miami); From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography (NSU Art Museum–Fort Lauderdale); Nation on the Move – The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Photographs by Frank Espada (Duke University Libraries); and Building Broward: A Guide to a Century of Architecture (Florida Atlantic University & the Broward Cultural Division).
In addition to their Ph.D., Rivera holds a Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Duke University (2015), an M.A. in Art History from Duke University (2010), and a B.A. with honors in Africana Studies and Art History from Grinnell College (2006).
Dr. Liz Rodrigues, Grinnell College
Liz Rodrigues is an Associate Professor and Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection of critical digital studies, digital humanities, and twentieth-century multiethnic U.S. literatures. Her book, Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures, explores how early twentieth-century writers used data collection to shape understandings of human selfhood. Rodrigues examines a “modernist aesthetic of data” that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic that dominates contemporary ideas of data’s revelatory power. Focusing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, she considers how these authors drew on sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to construct a critical data aesthetic, which they used to explore questions of identity related to race, gender, and nation. In doing so, they not only tell different life stories with data—they tell life stories differently because of it.
Rodrigues co-leads the Vivero Digital Fellows program and is affiliated with the Digital Studies Concentration. In the digital humanities, she has published on metadata creation and on ethical approaches to faculty-student digital collaborations. She has presented her work at the Digital Library Federation Forum, Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference, and Digital Humanities 2022. She currently co-chairs the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions, focusing on digital critical editions.
Rodrigues earned her B.A. in English with a minor in Greek from Kenyon College, an MLIS from the University of South Florida, and an MFA in Poetry from Florida Atlantic University through a fellowship funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. She joined Grinnell College for a term position in 2008–2009, and after earning her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature with a certification in African American and Diaspora Studies from the University of Michigan in 2015, she was a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellow at Temple University (2015–2016) before returning to Grinnell in 2016. She served as a Harris Faculty Fellow in 2019–2020.
Elizabeth Andrews, Waterloo Center Arts
Elizabeth Andrews is the Registrar and Curator of International Textiles at the Waterloo Center for the Arts. She works closely with donors, appraisers, patrons, and board members to assess, document, and highlight the museum’s rapidly growing collection. Andrews plays a central role in ensuring both the safe storage and public accessibility of the museum’s approximately 6,000 textile objects. She also develops and installs exhibitions focused on international textiles and coordinates traveling exhibitions, both incoming and outgoing.
Andrews studied Studio Art and French at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, before earning an M.A. in Textile History from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. While in Nebraska, she contributed to the preservation and documentation of the University’s International Quilt Study Center and Museum, a collection of historic and contemporary textiles.
Bringing a deep appreciation for unique art objects and respect for their makers and collectors, Andrews has applied her expertise to museum collections across the Midwest. For the past nine years, she has shared her skills and passion for connecting people through the arts with the Waterloo Center for the Arts community.
Jane Mertens, Grinnell College
Jane Mertens is an Assistant Cataloger at Grinnell College Libraries. She holds a master’s degree in Library and Information Science with a focus on information organization. Within the HADC project, she provides metadata support, focusing on how metadata, descriptions, and search terms can create richer contextual understanding and ensure that each object reaches the audiences for whom it is intended. In her work with HADC, Mertens applies principles of critical cataloging to achieve these goals.
Past Contributors
- Kent Shankle, Former Executive Director, Waterloo Center for the Arts
- R. Cecilia Knight, Associate Professor, Grinnell College