Jeffers Engelhardt

Jeffers Engelhardt is the Karen and Brian Conway '80, P'18 Presidential Teaching Professor of Music at Amherst College where he is affiliated with the department of religion, and programs in film and media studies and European studies. He researches the relationship of music, religion, secularity, and media; music and voice in Estonian culture and society; and music in Europe and the Finno-Ugric world. Jeffers’ book publications include Music and Religion (Oxford, 2026), and Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia. (Oxford, 2015). Since 2016 he is editor in chief of the Yale Journal of Music & Religion. Jeffers has been closely involved in the Institute’s Arvo Pärt Project, and co-edited (with Peter Bouteneff and Robert Saler) Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred (Fordham, 2020).

christina maranci

Christina Maranci is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, serving in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her work explores the art and culture of Armenia in all aspects, but with special emphasis on the late antique and medieval periods. She is the author of four books and over 100 articles and essays on medieval Armenian art and architecture, including the Art of Armenia (Oxford UP, 2018). Maranci has worked on issues of cultural heritage for over a decade, with a focus on the at-risk Armenian churches and monasteries in what is now Eastern Turkey. She is the author of op.-eds. and essays in the Wall Street Journal, Apollo, The Conversation, and Hyperallergic. She has also been featured on National Public Radio’s Open Source with Christopher Lydon. At the moment, she is working on a book about the city of Ani during the tenth and eleventh centuries, exploring issues of art and architecture, epigraphy, landscape, theology, politics, and social roles. She is co-editor with Peter Bouteneff Rethinking Sacred Arts (SVS Press, 2025).

Joan Shell

Joan Shell is a retired finance professional in international corporate and US private banking, having also served as the CFO/COO of a prominent Manhattan independent school.  She remains active in the education and not-for-profit worlds, including in the capacity of a consulting/ advisory practice.

She is a graduate of Vassar and has served as both a Trustee of the College, appointed to its Executive Committee, and Chair of the Board of its national alumni association - 45,000+ members strong - and awarded as one of its most respected leaders.  Recently, she played a primary role in the establishment of its global Institute of Liberal Arts.

Joan is reaching the ten year mark as a volunteer at Carnegie Hall and was appointed a Member of the Music Committee of the prestigious NY Cosmopolitan Club, for which she orchestrated an enormously successful program of Byzantine music by Peter Bouteneff and Alexander Lingas, featuring a performance by select members of the Cappella Romana.

Having earned a Masters degree from Brown University and an MBA from Fordham, she maintains close ties with these institutions as well.

Gary Vikan

Gary Vikan was Director of the Walters Art Museum from 1994 to 2013; from 1985 to 1994, he was the museum’s Chief Curator and Curator of Medieval Art. Before coming to Baltimore, Gary was Senior Associate at Harvard’s Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. A native of Minnesota, he received his BA from Carleton College and his PhD from Princeton University.

Gary serves on the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts of the Salzburg Global Seminar and is a board member of Baltimore’s Creative Alliance. He has been a member of the Maryland State Art Council, and advisor to the Getty Leadership Institute and Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology. He was appointed by President Clinton in 1999 to his Cultural Property Advisory Committee and was knighted by the French Minister of Culture in the Order of Arts and Letters in 2002. In retirement, Gary writes, lectures, and teaches, and provides consulting services to cultural non-profits and collectors. His recent books include Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art (2010), From the Holy Land to Graceland (2012), Sacred and Stolen: Confessions of a Museum Director (2016), and The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death (2020). He has also published a chapter entitled “Whence Agency?” in the volume Byzantine Materiality (DeGruyter 2024) edited by Evan Freeman and Roland Betancourt, emanating from an Institute of Sacred Arts conference.

AnneMarie Weyl Carr

Annemarie Weyl Carr, University Distinguished Professor Emerita of Art History at Southern Methodist University, has devoted her career to the history of the icon, questions of cultural interchange in the eastern Mediterranean Levant in the era of the Crusades, above all on the island of Cyprus, and on women artists in the Middle Ages. Her numerous publications include A Masterpiece of Byzantine Art Recovered: The Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus, Cyprus and the Devotional Arts of Byzantium in the Era of the Crusades, Asinou Across Time: Studies in the Archiecture and Murals of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus (ed. with Andreas Nicolaides).

Dr Carr has participated in our Institute’s symposia since its founding, and is author of “Sacred Art: A View from the Visual Arts,” the lead essay in our volume Rethinking Sacred Arts.