Announcing our 2026 Research Fellow
Madison Brown

MUUS Collection is thrilled to announce the recipient of our first-ever Research Fellowship: Madison Brown.

Launched in 2026, the MUUS Collection Research Fellowship comprises a $20,000 grant awarded to a curator or academic, allowing the Fellow to spend time in the MUUS Collection archives and use our new MUUSEUM Research Portal to develop an exhibition or publication concept based on works within the collections.

Brown’s proposal, titled Position Isn’t Everything: Rosalind Fox Solomon, Disability, and the Shared Conditions of Embodied Life will explore Rosalind Fox Solomon’s work in connection with disability studies, and will examine her thinking, looking, and photographic practice across five decades.

Brown is a scholar and curator who specializes in the history and theory of vernacular photography. Her work asks whose stories get told at an institutional level, exploring memory and absence across the archival and fine-art object, the local and the global, the personal and the social. Brown received her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University and has held curatorial appointments at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art and the Harvard Art Museums, most recently as the 2024-2026 John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography. She is currently researching family photographs and the family politics of their circulation as a Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History.

Brown was selected by MUUS Collection’s Advisory Board, comprised of Nathalie Herschdorfer, Sarah Meister, Mark Sealy, Paul Roth, and Sophie Wright. Over the next year, Brown will spend time in the archives at MUUS Collection to further her research into Position Isn’t Everything.