Profile

Sasha Whittaker is a Ph.D. candidate studying modern art with a focus on the history of photography. Her research interests include photography in the illustrated press, relationships between art and politics in the interwar period, and the migration of artists from Eastern Europe to France and the United States. Her dissertation, “George Hoyningen-Huene and the Cultural Politics of Fashion Photography,” situates Hoyningen-Huene (1900–1968) as one of many Eastern European émigrés who established careers in photography and design in Paris after World War I. This project investigates how Hoyningen-Huene’s fashion photographs were not only tools for elite consumption of luxury goods but also participated in the profound social and political transformations of interwar Europe and the United States.

Her doctoral research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Eugene Bradford *60 Graduate Fellowship, the Donald and Mary Hyde Summer Fellowship for Research Abroad, the Wallis Annenberg Research Grant at USC, and the Beatrice, Benjamin, and Richard Bader Fellowship in the Visual Arts of the Theatre at Houghton Library, Harvard University. She is a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sasha holds a B.A. in art history from Macaulay Honors College at the City College of New York/CUNY. Before coming to Princeton, she was a 2017–18 Fulbright Study/Research Grantee at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.