Kale Serrato Doyen

Kale Serrato Doyen (she/her) studies Black and Latinx artists in modern and contemporary art history of the United States. Her interests in the politics of representation, landscape, and infrastructure culminate in her dissertation, Mapping the Teenie Harris Archive: Photography, Community, and Pittsburgh’s Black Built Environment. Combining digital methods and community-based participatory research, this project utilizes the photographic archive of Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908-1998) to chart and recover Black geographies and architecture in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This project builds upon her M.A. thesis, “The Oppositional Landscape Photography of Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris,” wherein she identified an “oppositional gaze” (as defined by Black feminist scholar bell hooks) in Harris’s landscape photographs of Pittsburgh’s postwar urban renewal program from 1957-1962.

Kale first entered HAA through the 2020-21 Hot Metal Bridge Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship. Since matriculating into the Ph.D. program, she has served as the Graduate Student Organization (GSO) Vice President (2022-23), GSO President (2023-24), and Symposium Chair of the 2024 Graduate Student Symposium, Ruin and Reparation: (Dis)Repair in Art and Architectural History. This symposium helped inaugurate HAA’s newly formed Constellation, Reparation—a Constellation that Kale authored in the departmental restructuring of the HAA Constellations model in 2023.