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The Great Courses Travel 12 — Cabin & Speakers

Southeast Asia  • February 3rd – 17th, 2014

 

DIANA K. MCDONALD, PH.D.

Dr. Diana Krumholz McDonald is an art historian and lecturer specializing in ancient art. She received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Harvard, and her Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she concentrated in Ancient Near Eastern and Pre-Columbian art.

Since 1997, she has been on the faculty of Boston College, where she teaches The Art of Ancient America and Ancient Mediterranean Art.

She frequently lectures at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where her courses have included the Art of Egypt and Nubia, Art of the Ancient Near East, and Art of the Ancient Americas. Most recently Dr. McDonald advised on, and lectured at the Symposium for the Museum of Fine Art’s 2011–2012 exhibition “Aphrodite and the Gods of Love.” She wrote the first chapter in the show’s catalog, entitled Aphrodite’s Ancestors: Ancient Near Eastern Goddesses of Love.

Her primary interest is in animal iconography in ancient art, and in aspects of evolution that help explain the origin of art and symbolism in art. She wrote her dissertation on Serpent Imagery in the Ancient Near East. More recently, she has been focusing on lion symbolism, the goddess Ishtar, and the history of the horse.

Dr. McDonald published nine essays in the book The Looting of the Iraq Museum in 2005, has written scholarly articles and reviews, and frequently lectures on the art of Mesopotamia and other regions for clubs and in venues including the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory.

Previously Dr. McDonald taught the Art History Humanities course at Columbia, worked at the Metropolitan Museum in NY in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art and in the Dept. of Film and TV, worked at the National Museum in Jakarta, Indonesia, and lectured at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland, where she lived for two years. She was also a curator at the Arthur M. Sackler Collections in NY, where she helped to mount exhibitions on ancient Iranian ceramics and PreColumbian Ceramics all over the US and in Scotland. Dr. McDonald has led groups on art tours, including a tour of Brazil called the Art and Culture of Brazil for the Massachusetts College of Art.

Dr. McDonald was a Henry Luce Scholar in Indonesia, a Presidential Scholar at Columbia University, and received both a Fulbright Scholarship and a Deutscher Akademische Austausch Dienst Scholarship, which she declined in order to go to Asia. She is on the Visiting Committee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Department of Ancient Art, the Collections Committee of the Harvard Art Museums, and the Advisory Board of Zoo New England. She has visited the museums and archaeological sites of over 40 countries.

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