
Claire Dillon
Northwestern University
Trinity College Dublin (TCD)
Arts/Performing Arts/Film
Claire is a PhD Candidate in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and the inaugural Fellow of the International Interfaith Research Lab at Teachers College. She studies the intersections of visual cultures, identities, and faiths in the medieval Mediterranean and their modern afterlives, with a focus on the history of Sicily. Her most recent publications uncover the history of the Cathedral of Mogadishu, a Fascist-era monument built by Italian colonizers in the style of a medieval Sicilian cathedral. She has also published articles that examine the ways in which modern extremists misuse the medieval past to legitimate their ideologies.
Her research has received numerous national and international prizes, including the 2025 Paul Mellon Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and a 2022-23 Fellowship in the Department of Medieval Art & The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to her research, Claire is the project manager of the Getty-funded Connecting Art Histories Initiative titled "Black Mediterranean: Artistic Encounters and Counter-narratives," and she interned with the United Nations Headquarters, UNESCO, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) during her graduate studies.
She was a 2017 Mitchell Scholar and studied Medieval Language, Literature and Culture at Trinity. While there, she interned for Art for Amnesty, served on the board of the Global Undergraduate Awards, which is based in Dublin, and was a digital humanities research assistant to Professor Mark Faulkner, working with twelfth-century copies of Old English texts.
Prior to the Mitchell Scholarship, Claire was the Director of Education and Outreach for the nonprofit ART WORKS Projects, where she developed exhibitions and programming to amplify diverse social justice causes across three continents. She received degrees in Art History and Italian from Northwestern University, and also interned and studied in Bologna, Italy; Havana, Cuba; and Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Chile. At Northwestern, she was a Mellon Mays Fellow, Editor in Chief of Northwestern Art Review, and an executive member of NUCHR, the largest student-run human rights conference in the US.