Professional Background
Ekaterina Shipyatsky is a PhD candidate in political science and museum studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College. Prior to her graduate studies, Ms. Shipyatsky was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University in Ulyanovsk, Russia.
Ms. Shipyatsky’s research focuses on the politics of memory in museums and memorials of violence in Poland and North America. Her dissertation is a multi-site project that traces the ways museums and memorials theorize political responsibility through elements of space, material, and narrative.
In addition to her academic research, Ms. Shipyatsky maintains a robust curatorial practice, centered on grassroots memorialization efforts. Currently, she is a curatorial assistant at the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s Art in Public Spaces Program, where she has worked to develop a set of public-facing activations of campus sites centered around Black and Native histories at the university.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Randolph and Elizabeth Braham Research Fellow, Ekaterina Shipyatsky will conduct research on representations of the Holocaust in Polish and American museums. She plans to utilize the Museum’s vast archive of guidebooks, pamphlets, exhibition catalogues, and correspondences from Holocaust museums across the globe. She will also use the Museum’s collections to research the connections between representations of the Holocaust and representations of anti-Black and anti-Native violence in museums.
Residency Period: June 1, 2027 – July 31, 2027