about

Natalie Coletta, Founder

Natalie Coletta is an art historian, artist and civic activist dedicated to affordable, inclusive education. As a professor at the Community College of Rhode Island since 1998, Coletta was an early proponent of developing curriculum to decolonize historical narratives in Modern and Contemporary art scholarship. She's committed to iterative design of open educational resources for students in the Foundation years of their college years. Rejecting the dominant language and scholarship that create a climate of elitism and exclusivity, Coletta founded ArtxHistory to serve students and educators, particularly those in the formative years of academic study. Through ArtxHistory, resources addressing challenging topics in the areas of art practice, history and critique of the 20th and 21st centuries are made more accessible to learners, inviting active participation in the research process. 

Anthony Diaz Marte, Fellow

Anthony Diaz Marte, a 2026 Fellow with ArtxHistory, is an emerging scholar, critic, poet, and fiction writer currently earning his baccalaureate at Columbia University. His research explores where the literary and the visual meet in contemporary art: how artworks draw on specific literary texts, and how they take on new tangibility through typography and other literary devices. A multilingual reader, Anthony works across Classical Latin literature, Romance literatures in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, 19th-century Romanticism, and 20th-century Modernism.

An alum of the Community College of Rhode Island, where he graduated with honors and was a member of Phi Theta Kappa, Anthony advocates for the arts and humanities as a transformative force. When he isn't reading or writing, he plays guitar, draws, and keeps up with Vogue.

Halima Ibrahim, Fellow

Halima Ibrahim, a 2021 Fellow with ArtxHistory, is a Master's student at Oxford University and a 2025 graduate of Stanford University with a Bachelor’s degree in Art Practice with Honors and a Bachelor’s in Art History. Halima works in multimedia photography, with an alternative camera and printing techniques. Combining photography with culturally traditional processes such as embroidery and gilding, her work interrogates systemic and social issues in the United States and in Egypt. Halima is interested in Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Art. Her research in the Art of the Arab Spring is fueled by personal experience growing up in Cairo and evacuating the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. 

An alum of the Community College of Rhode Island, Halima is the former Rhode Island Youth Poetry Ambassador. Unafraid to tackle controversial, nuanced topics such as gun violence, chronic illness, ableism, Islamophobia, and the struggles of being biracial in America, she unapologetically speaks to audiences from twenty to seven thousand. Some of Halima’s most powerful poetry can be seen in her 2018 TEDxTalk, “When life gives you Lyme.”

Chris Diani, Fellow

Chris Diani is a filmmaker and photographer based in Providence, Rhode Island, who served as a 2021 Fellow with ArtxHistory. A graduate of Seattle Film Institute’s Full Immersion Program, Chris has his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, where he was awarded a 2024 Fung E.M Humanities Summer Fellowship. He previously graduated the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth with a BFA in Photography and a minor in Art History after earning his Associate of Fine Art's degree from the Community College of Rhode Island. Chris's photographs are held in the archive of the Holt/Smithson Foundation and have been published in the Boston Globe, Advocate, Art in America Guide, and Options Magazine. 

As an advocate for sex, gender, and racial equality, Chris has lent his skills to Seattle Pride, Gay City Health Project, Rhode Island Pride, and the Black Lives Matter movement. In his personal work, he explores queer representation through genre film and portrait photography. His first feature film, the award-winning gay zombie comedy Creatures from the Pink Lagoon, screened in over 30 cities worldwide and was released on DVD in 2007.

Valerie C. Doran, Content Advisor

Valerie C. Doran is an editor, independent curator, writer, and translator specializing in the field of Chinese contemporary art, with a special interest in Chinese contemporary art theory and cross-cultural currents.

Doran is a graduate of Wellesley College (1978), where she was a student of Chinese art historian Anne Clapp. From 1993-2003 Doran was Associate Editor and Contributing Editor, respectively, of Orientations Magazine. She has served as editorial director of a number of catalogue publications in the field of Chinese art, including China’s New Art, Post-1989 (Seattle and Hong Kong, 1993; re-issued Asia Art Archive, 2004); Three Parallel Artworlds: 100 Art Things from Modern Chinese History (Hong Kong, 2015); and sculptor and collector Richard Rosenblum’s Art of the Natural World: Wild Nature in Chinese Sculptural Art (Boston, 2000). Doran has written frequently on Asian contemporary art and is an active translator in the field of Chinese contemporary art criticism, including texts by Gao Shiming, Gao Minglu, Chang Tsong-Zung, Fei Dawei, Wu Guanzhong, Wu Shanzhuan and Gao Xingjian, among others. As an independent curator, Doran has worked since the mid-1980s with artists, public institutions, private galleries, and alternative spaces in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, Indonesia, and Los Angeles on a range of projects and has also participated in performative projects by artists across media, including works by Kung Chi Shing, Kingsley Ng, The Box and U Theatre. Doran is currently a Fellow at the Chinese Art Media Lab (CAMLab), Harvard University.