Plan Your Visit

• Free with Museum admission.
• This panel discussion takes place in Lynn Wyatt Theater, located in the Kinder Building. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Parking Information | Museum Hours | MFAH Campus Map

Danielle Smotherman Bennett (PhD, Bryn Mawr College), assistant research curator and consulting curator for this exhibition, is a specialist in the art of the ancient Mediterranean and provenance research. Bennett is a contributing author and co-editor of two forthcoming volumes, Phenomenology and the Painted Vase and Representations of Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean and Contemporary Museums. 

Sarah Kielt Costello (PhD, SUNY Binghamton) is a professor of art history and director of the Humanities Program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She is a co-editor and contributing author of several volumes, including Ethics in Archaeological Practice (2024), the Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World (2022), Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (2021), and Seals and Sealings in the Ancient World (2018). Costello has been published in numerous journals, and has excavated in Cyprus, Türkiye, Israel, and Greece.

Sophie Crawford-Brown (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is assistant professor of art history and director of the program in Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations at Rice University. Her first book, Religious Architecture and Roman Expansion: Temples, Terracottas, and the Shaping of Identity, 3rd-1st c. BCE (2025), focuses on architectural terracottas in Italic temple decoration before the reign of Augustus. Crawford-Brown has excavated in Cyprus and Italy, and has worked on museum projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Archaeological Institute of America, the University of Tübingen’s Institut für Klassische Archäologie, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. 

Kristina Neumann (PhD, University of Cincinnati) is a Roman/digital historian, who applies 21st-century technologies and innovative methodologies to analyze the ancient past and advance academic and public engagement with this history. Her first book, Antioch in Syria: A History from Coins, 300 BCE-450 CE (2021), critically reassesses one of the most prominent and yet under-explored cities of the ancient Middle East from its Seleucid foundation into Late Antiquity. Neumann is also the co-director of SYRIOS, a digital humanities project bringing the coins and stories of ancient Syria to a wide public audience, and an executive producer of the podcast, Public Historians at Work.