Curator Bios

William Keyse Rudolph, Ph.D.
Deputy Director, Curatorial Affairs
William Keyse Rudolph is Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Nelson-Atkins, a key role that helps shape the museum’s curatorial team, permanent collection, and exhibition directions. Prior to joining the museum’s leadership team, Rudolph served as Chief Curator and the Marie and Hugh Halff Curator of American and European Art at San Antonio Museum of Art, 2013–2020, along with duties as co-interim director. He also has served as a curator at Dallas Museum of Art, Worcester Art Museum, and Milwaukee Art Museum, in addition to holding research and support positions at Philadelphia Museum of Art in European paintings and European Decorative Arts.

Rudolph was educated at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of Virginia and Bryn Mawr College. He also has received decorative arts training through Attingham Summer School for Country Houses and Collections and Royal Collections Studies. In 2017, Rudolph was a fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, an intensive leadership skills training program for art museum curators.

Major exhibitions Rudolph has organized or co-organized include Bluebonnets and Beyond: Julian Onderdonk, American Impressionist (2008–2009), In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans (2011–2012), Thomas Sully: Painted Performance (2013–2014), Highest Heaven: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Collection of Roberta and Richard Huber (2016–2017), and Spain: 500 Years of Spanish Painting from the Museums of Madrid (2018).


Stephanie Fox Knappe, Ph.D.
Samuel Sosland Curator of American Art
Stephanie Fox Knappe, Samuel Sosland Curator of American Art, holds a doctoral degree in art history from University of Kansas where she taught several courses. She was the exhibition coordinator for the first traveling retrospective exhibition of the work of Aaron Douglas and served as acting curator, European and American painting and sculpture, at the Spencer Museum of Art at KU before joining the staff at the Nelson-Atkins.

Knappe has published articles on a variety of topics and contributed to the exhibition catalogues Tales from the Easel: American Narrative Paintings from Southeastern Museums, circa 1800-1950; Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist; Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection; and Go West! Art of the American Frontier from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. She also contributed scholarship to The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins: American Paintings to 1945.

In addition to numerous small-scale shows often dedicated to American art on paper, Knappe curated the featured exhibition Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Masterpieces of Modern Mexico from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection and served as venue curator for the Nelson-Atkins’ featured exhibitions To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America; Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America; Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College; American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood; and for the Kansas City presentation of 30 Americans and the upcoming Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking.

Knappe has served as a juror for multiple national exhibitions and is also a mentor with the Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship program.


Ling-en Lu, Ph.D.
Associate Curator, Chinese Art
Ling-en Lu, Associate Curator of Early Chinese Art, joined the Museum in 1999. Born in Taiwan, she holds a doctoral degree in Art History from the University of Kansas as well as a Master’s of Library Science from Indiana University. Ling-en has actively presented papers at Art History conferences and has published several articles on Chinese paintings.

During her tenure at the Museum, she has been a part of coordinating The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology, a special international exhibition organized by the museum and the National Gallery of Art in 1999, and has contributed to the two-volume book, New Perspectives on China’s Past: Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, which was published by Yale University Press and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 2004.


Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Ph.D.
Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Senior Curator of European Art

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan is the Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Senior Curator of European Art. Marcereau DeGalan came to the Nelson-Atkins from The Dayton Art Institute (DAI), where she was Chief Curator and Curator of European Art. A specialist in British and French 18th and 19th-century art, Marcereau DeGalan leads the European Arts division, which includes the departments of Ancient Art, European Paintings & Sculpture and Architecture, Design and Decorative Arts. She conducts senior-level research exhibition and catalogue projects and is responsible for acquisitions, interpretation and presentation of the European collections.

Marcereau DeGalan was hired at the DAI in 2012 as Curator of Collections and Exhibitions. Previously, she held curatorial posts at the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Detroit Institute of Arts


MacKenzie Mallon
Specialist, Provenance
MacKenzie Mallon is Specialist, Provenance at the Nelson-Atkins, where she oversees provenance research, procedures, documentation and review in conjunction with the curatorial departments.  A Kansas City native, Mallon received her BA in History and MA in Art History from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Mallon’s primary research interest is Nazi-era provenance and the art market during World War II. She was the curator of record for the installation Braving Shells for Art: the Monuments Men of the Nelson-Atkins and is the author of “A Refuge from War: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Evacuation of Art to the Midwest during World War II” (Getty Research Journal, February 2016). In addition to her work on provenance research and documentation, Mallon is currently studying the initial development of the Nelson-Atkins collection during the early 1930s.


April M. Watson, Ph.D.
Curator, Photography
April M. Watson holds a doctorate in Art History from the University of Kansas and an MA in Art History from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. She has a BFA in graphic design from Alfred University. Since she began at the Nelson-Atkins in 2007, Watson has organized numerous exhibitions. Most recently, Watson co-curated the exhibition Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time, the photographer’s first museum retrospective. In 2013, she served as the photography curator for Impressionist France: Visions of Nation from Le Gray to Monet, an exhibition of paintings and photographs co-organized with the Saint Louis Art Museum. In addition, she has curated and co-curated several exhibitions from the permanent collection, including Through the Lens: Visions of African-American Experience, 1950-1970; Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans, a career retrospective of the artist; About Face: Contemporary Portraiture; Thinking Photography: Five Decades at the Kansas City Art Institute; Time in the West: Photographs by Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe and Mark Ruwedel; Human/Nature: Recent European Landscape Photography; and Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood. She has also served as the venue curator for the loan exhibitions Richard Learoyd: In the Studio; Edward Steichen: In High Fashion The Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937; and Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh. Currently, she is working with the Gordon Parks Foundation on an exhibition and catalogue featuring Parks’s photographs of Muhammad Ali, slated to be on view at the Nelson-Atkins in winter 2019.

Prior to joining the Nelson-Atkins, Watson served as a curatorial research assistant at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and was an NEA curatorial intern at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. Watson has contributed writing and scholarship to numerous exhibitions and catalogues for the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She has also contributed research and writing to several artist monographs.


Kimberly Masteller, Ph.D.
Jeanne McCray Beals Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art
Kimberly Masteller is the Jeanne McCray Beals Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Before coming to the Nelson-Atkins in 2008, Masteller held the position of Assistant Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art at the Harvard Art Museums from 2002–2008. Masteller has curated several exhibitions at the Nelson-Atkins, including: Revealing a Hidden Treasure: A Jain Shrine from India, Echoes: Islamic Art and Contemporary Artists, and the traveling exhibitions Roads of Arabia: Archaeology and History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and From the Land of the Taj Mahal: Paintings for India’s Mughal Emperors from the Chester Beatty Library. She is the author of Masterworks from India and Southeast Asia: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (2016). Her recent publications include “Arthur Upham Pope and Collecting Persian Art in Kansas City,” in Arthur Upham Pope. (2016), and “Echoes and Resonance: Creating Dialogues between Historical Islamic Art, Contemporary Art and Museum Audiences,” in Global Trends in Modern and Contemporary Islamic Art. (2015).

Along with her curatorial work, Masteller has served as an adjunct instructor in Asian and Islamic art history at the Kansas City Art Institute, the University of Missouri, Kansas City, the University of Kansas, the Art Institute of Boston, Ohio University, and The Ohio State University and held the position of visiting assistant professor of art history at Denison University. Masteller has also contributed as a consultant for the Advanced Placement Art History program. Masteller holds a Ph.D. in the history of art from The Ohio State University, a Master’s degree in art history from Ohio University, and a B.A. from Muskingum University. She is a recipient of grants from the Fulbright Fellowship program and the Social Science Research Council.