Barbora Bartunkova

Barbora Bartunkova is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art Department at Yale University and the 2022–23 Chester Dale Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

She specializes in European art, photography, and film from the nineteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on interwar and Cold War visual cultures. Her research interests include the intersection of aesthetics and politics, representations of women and gender, and the relationship between art and ecology.

Her dissertation, titled “Sites of Resistance: Antifascism and the Czechoslovak Avant-Garde,” investigates the capacity of art to confront fascist ideology and violence between 1932 and 1945. Her project examines avant-garde publications, exhibitions, theater, film, poetry, and the visual arts to demonstrate how Czechoslovak artists developed strategies of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and intermediality to counter fascism and mobilize publics across a range of social and cultural spaces. The dissertation situates the Czechoslovak avant-garde’s aesthetic modes of resistance in transnational perspectives, highlighting their unique contributions within broader histories of artistic opposition to political oppression and war in a global context.

In 2018–19, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has previously held curatorial and museum positions at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Lobkowicz Collections in Prague, and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and participated in the 2020 CCL/Mellon Seminar in Curatorial Practice at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York.

Recently, she has contributed to major international exhibitions, including Toyen: The Dreaming Rebel (National Gallery Prague; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 2021–22) and Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented (MoMA, 2020–21).

Bartunkova holds an M.A. with Distinction in the History of Art from University College London (UCL), where she also received her B.A. in French with Film Studies. Her M.A. Dissertation, “Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear and Cultures of Surveillance in Communist Czechoslovakia,” was awarded the Oxford Art Journal Prize.