Alison Hokanson is Curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A specialist in nineteenth-century Northern European and British painting, she has curated and co-curated exhibitions at The Met including The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy (2014), Turner’s Whaling Pictures (2016), Rodin at The Met (2017–18), Victorian Masterpieces from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico (2022–2024), and, most recently, Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature. Her scholarship ranges from research on French Romantic drawings to the literary and artistic context of Vincent van Gogh’s Cypresses. She received her BA in art history from Brown University and her MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where she was an Erwin Panofsky Fellow.

Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this role, she holds responsibility for Northern European drawings and prints from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, currently on view at The Met, she has curated and co-curated such exhibitions as Crossroads: Drawing the Dutch Landscape (Harvard Art Museums, 2022); Divine Encounter: Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels (The Frick Collection, 2017); and Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time (The Frick Collection, 2017). Joanna holds a Bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a Master’s and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.