Faculty
June Burns Bové Adjunct Assistant Professor, CCE
June Burns Bove' earned a BA from Bucknell University in English and French Literature and an MA from New York University in Costume Studies. For twenty years a contract employee of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, June is Textile Conservator for Yeshiva University Museum and has been an adjunct assistant professor in the School of Graduate Studies of Fashion Institute of Technology since 1991 where her specialty is costume exhibition.
She has consulted for many museums and institutions including The Newark Museum, The New-York Historical Society, The New Jersey Historical Society, The Jewish Museum, the Morse Museum of Winter Park, Florida, The Merchant's House of New York City, and the Art Department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In 2011 The Costume Society of America named her a Fellow of the Society.
Nancy Diehl Adjunct Instructor
Nancy Deihl is a historian of fashion and textiles with a specialty in the 19th and 20th centuries. With many years of experience in the field of modern and contemporary art, she is particularly interested in connections between fashion and art practices. Since 2003, she has been on the faculty at New York University in the Costume Studies M.A. program, and at Fashion Institute of Technology in the graduate program in Fashion and Textile Studies, and in the Textile/Surface Design department. Recently she co-edited the History of Fashion content for Oxford Art Online. She is currently writing a book on the history of fashion from 1850 to present. She received her B.A. in Art History from Douglass College of Rutgers University and her M.A. in Costume Studies from New York University.
Judith Eisenberg Adjunct Assistant Professor, CCE
Judith Eisenberg has been a textile conservator in private practice for 35 years. She has advised, conserved and installed textiles and costume for museums, historic houses, foundations, collectors and other private individuals, and is the principal contract conservator for The Jewish Museum in NYC. She has taught textile conservation based courses in the Fashion and Textile Studies program since 1991. She received her BA in Anthropology from Hunter College, NY and her MA from Wichita State University, Kansas. Judith is a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation and a member of the Textile Society of America and the Costume Society of America.
Rebecca Fifield Adjunct Instructor
Rebecca Fifield is Collections Manager for the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ms. Fifield received a BA from Mary Baldwin College, VA and an MA in Museum Studies from The George Washington University in 1999, where she received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to study collections care administration. Her research focuses on the dress of American working class women in the eighteenth century.
She is the editor of Women’s Dress During the American Revolution (2004) and recently published an article in Pasold Research Fund’s journal Textile History entitled “Had on When She Went Away: Expanding the Usefulness of Garment Data in American Runaway Advertisements 1750-90 through Database Analysis.”
Lourdes Font Associate Professor
Dr. Lourdes Font (B.A., Middlebury College, M.A., Ph.D., New York University) is an Associate Professor in the department of History of Art and in the M.A. Program in Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She has also taught at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s M.A. Program in the History of Decorative Arts, at Parsons School of Design, and at New York University.
She has lectured on dress in art at the Bard Graduate Center, the Huntington Library, the Frick Collection, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Among her recent publications are Fashion and Visual Art, over one hundred reference articles added to the Grove Dictionary of Art Online, co-edited with a colleague at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Nancy Deihl. She has also contributed articles and essays to West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture, to the Cooper-Hewitt’s Museum’s exhibition catalogue Fashion in Colors, and to Fashion Theory.
Kathy Francis Adjunct Instructor
Kathy Francis is an independent textile conservator and the owner of Francis Textile Conservation LLC in Summit, New Jersey. She has 30 years experience in textile conservation including 8 years as Chief Conservator at the Textile Conservation Center, a regional conservation lab in Lowell, Massachusetts and 8 years as Textile Conservator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Her expertise includes fiber analysis; conservation cleaning; stabilization and compensation for loss in textiles; and emergency preparedness and recovery for textile collections. Kathy earned a BS from Framingham State University, Massachusetts, and was apprentice trained in textile conservation at the Textile Conservation Center at the Museum of American Textile History. Kathy is a Professional Associate of the American Institute of Conservation.
Preeti Gopinath Adjunct Instructor
Preeti Gopinath is an Adjunct Instructor teaching textile history courses at FIT- in the Fashion and Textiles Studies Department of the School of Graduate Studies, as well as in the Textiles Development and Marketing Department. A graduate of Textile Design from the 5 year Professional Education Program of the National Institute of Design, India, she is an internationally experienced textile designer, educator and textile industry professional with 15 years of experience in the area of textile design, education, entrepreneurship, and research. Prior to moving to New York in 2011, she owned and operated Designerie-a luxury textile design studio, taught Textiles courses at George Brown College and Sheridan College in Canada, was a founding Faculty member of Srishti –School of Art, Design and Technology in India, and was also an Artist –Educator with the Learning through the Arts program of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Canada.
Preeti’s research undertakings include the Gyaser brocades of Benares that are made for the Tibetan monasteries, successfully researched and unearthed a rare, surviving example of the Gatthua loom- precursor to the Jaala loom of Benares, and the History of Bharatanatyam –a classical Indian dance form. A longstanding member of the School of Practical Philosophy, she has been a student, an avid Plato enthusiast and teacher of philosophy for 12 years- including courses in the School’s online Distance Learning program. She is also a classical Bharatanatyam dancer who has performed, taught and conducted dance workshops extensively all over the world.
Rebecca Kelly Adjunct Instructor
Rebecca J. Kelly is a dress historian, and an adjunct instructor in the History of Art Department as well as the Fashion and Textile Studies Program at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Rebecca is the author of Fashion in The Gilded Age: A Profile of Newport’s King Family, in Twentieth- Century American Fashion, edited by Linda Welters and Patricia Cunningham. Rebecca worked for many years as a conservator holding positions at The Preservation Society of Newport County, and later at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She continues to work as a consultant assisting numerous organizations with the interpretation and installation of textile exhibitions. She holds a BA in Art History, as well as an MS from the department of Textiles, Fashion Merchandizing, and Design at the University of Rhode Island. Rebecca has been a long time member of the Costume Society of America. She has served on the CSA Northeastern Regional Board, and co-chaired the CSA 2011 National Symposium and Annual Meeting in Boston.
Désirée Koslin #Adjunct Professor, CCE BA Empire State College, New York MFA City College, CUNY MA, PhD Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Dr. Désirée Koslin teaches courses in textile history, world dress and cultures, and courses on textile structure and analysis. She is active as an art historian, especially of the medieval period in Europe and the Islamic world and participates in the field by giving papers at professional conferences and reference work projects. She has published profusely on various subjects related to textiles and dress. She is also an exhibiting artist using fiber media. Dr. Koslin received her BA from Empire State College, New York, an MFA from City College, CUNY, and her MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Now semi-retired, she divides her time between Sweden and NYC.
Diane Maglio Adjunct Instructor
Diane Maglio is the associate chair of the Fashion Dept. at Berkeley College, New York and was named Faculty of the Year for the School of Business in 2010. She is an adjunct at Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Prior to her academic career she was a sales and product development executive in the better men’s wholesale business providing menswear for American’s top tier retailers.
She has published in Dress (the academic journal of the Costume Society of America); Proceedings (the journal for the Textile Society of America) and was special editorial consultant and contributor to A Century of Men’s Fashion, published by DNR, men’s trade journal. She received the Evelyn Welch Livingstone award for research on “Palm Beach, Fountainhead of Fashion for Men” and was awarded a seed grant by Fashion Institute of Technology to extend her research on resort wear for men in France. Her most current research, “Synthetic fibers, Showy cars and Sportshirts: liberating the fashion spirit of the man in the gray flannel suit,” was published in Proceedings of TSA, 2010. Diane Maglio received an MA from Fashion Institute of Technology, NY, BA from Rutgers, NJ and an AAS from Fashion Institute of Technology specializing in tailoring.
Denyse Montegut Full Professor and Department Chairperson
Denyse Montegut is Full Professor and Chair of the Fashion and Textile Studies master’s degree program at the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY) where she has directed the academic evolution of the program since 1996 and taught conservation science courses since 1991. She received her BA in Art History with a minor in Mathematics from Brooklyn College, and holds an MA in Art History and a Certificate in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is ABD in art conservation research at the University of Delaware, where her work centered on the authentication of thirteenth-century printed textile fragments. Her publications range over a number of historical and technical subjects and include “Examination of metal threads from some XV/XVI century Italian textiles by scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry,” “Moth or Mollusc? A technical examination of Byssus fibers,” “The Characterization and Identification of Faux Suede Materials,” and “Characterization of Morphological and Optical Properties of Regenerated Protein Fibers, 1938-1960.” She has also taught specialty workshops and lectured at NYU over the years.
Denyse also has a small private conservation business and is the consulting textile conservator for the Guggenheim Museum. She has been a pioneer in the creation of fashion archives having set up the one for Calvin Klein as early as 1996. She continues to consult for start-up archives. Denyse is a member of the American Institute for Conservation and the Textile Society of America.
Sarah Scaturro
Adjunct Instructor
Sarah Scaturro is a textile conservator at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. She is an instructor in the Fashion and Textile Studies MA program at the Fashion Institute of Technology, as well as the Fashion Studies MA program at Parsons The New School for Design. She has written for Fashion Theory, Hand/Eye Magazine, Russian Fashion Theory, Journal of Design History, Selvedge, Fashion Projects, Worn Fashion Journal and Grove On-Line Art Encyclopedia, among others. She lectures internationally on fashion and textile history, with particular expertise in sustainable fashion, fashion and technology, and fashionable camouflage. Her independent curatorial activities include the exhibitions “Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion” and “Principals of Design: Pratt Fashion Alumni,” both exhibited at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York City. She is the founder and organizer of www.ExhibitingFashion.com, a website devoted to exploring fashion and textile exhibitionism.
Rebecca Shea
Adjunct Instructor
Private corporate curator and exhibition designer
Rebecca Shea received a BA from Smith College and a MA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She has worked with Fine Arts and Antiques all her life. As a professional art consultant, she has managed private and public collections throughout the United States. For four years she curated a series of contemporary art exhibitions in the public gallery space at 59th and Park in Manhattan. As an exhibition designer she has planned and overseen the development of numerous exhibitions. She continues to work as an art consultant while she teaches and writes a monthly column on Contemporary Country Style for a New York State regional newspaper.
Valerie Soll
Adjunct Instructor
Valerie Soll received her BA from University of Oregon and her special training in rug restoration in Ankara, Turkey. For the last 19 years she has been the textile conservator at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in NYC with a specialty in conservation dyeing. She has taught dye related courses at FIT, NYU, and Parsons and teaches collections management and basic conservation courses in the graduate program at FIT. Valerie is also a reweaving expert and does rug workshops for FIT’s advanced conservation students. She is a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation and the Textile Society of America.
Denny Stone
Adjunct Instructor
Denny Stone received her BA from University of Denver, a Diplôme from L'Ecole du Louvre, Paris, France, and her MA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is currently the Chief
Collections Manager of over 65,000 objects for the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Previously she was the Collections Manager for New York Historical Society. Over the past 20 years she has been the consulting conservator and/or curator for many museums, historic houses and private collections.
Tanya Wettenhall
Adjunct Instructor
Tanya Williams Wetenhall received her BA from New York University and her MA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She serves as an independent consultant, curator and researcher to private and public dress and textile collections. She is an adjunct instructor in the graduate program at FIT and at New York University. She operates a private consulting business and specializes in the appraisal of textiles, dress and couture, as well as fine and decorative Russian art.
Tanya has worked as a researcher in ethnographic, design and fashion museums in the United States and Belgium. Fluent in several languages, she previously worked for the United States government at the U.S. embassies in Moscow and Rome and as a cultural liaison in Russia and the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China and Cuba. She started her career as an assistant publicist with designer Fernando Sanchez and later worked as a fashion and textile writer. She lectures at museums and for special interest groups.