Class of 1985

STACEY SELL makes a difference at the National Gallery.

Thanks to the 2006 celebration of Rembrandt's 400 th birthday, Sell, the assistant curator of old master drawings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., had a busy year. She helped curate the gallery's current exhibition, "Strokes of Genius: Rembrandt's Prints and Drawings," and authored the brochure that accompanied the Hood Museum of Art's Rembrandt exhibit. She also organized the National Gallery's British Romanticism exhibition, which opened last November and, like Rembrandt, is on view through March 18. "Part of what I really enjoyed about working on the British Romanticism exhibit is that most of the artists I've worked on up until now didn't leave very much information about what they were thinking or feeling when they were working on their art," says Sell, who has been with the National Gallery for eight years. "But once you hit the 18th and 19th centuries, the artists start to talk a lot and leave piles of letters and diaries. I enjoyed getting to see them as people." Sell's interest in art developed in high school, but her Dartmouth foreign study experience in Italy with art history professor Joy Kenseth cemented her desire to work in the field. "It was so exciting to be in contact with art every single day in Florence," says Sell, who graduated magna cum laude with Phi Beta Kappa honors from Dartmouth and wrote her doctoral dissertation on Rembrandt. "There's a lot going on at the National Gallery but, like the FSP semester, what's really great is being in contact with the art."