The Metropolitan Museum of Art has awarded Ph.D. Candidate Fernanda Villarroel the Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellowship, reserved for predoctoral and postdoctoral-level scholars from the United States and abroad with promising projects that will contribute to the art-historical field at large. This one-year research project focuses on mythical and historic imageries of the feminine in art from Benin and Ife, and will be hosted by Alisa La Gamma, the Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator in Charge, Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Her dissertation—directed by Dr. Jill Casid and titled “Figurations of the Feminine in Contemporary Art from Lagos, Nigeria”— unfolds in-depth analyses of artworks that draw on long-term vernacular figurations of feminine power, to foreground alternative aesthetic languages for black critical studies and feminism.