The late Margaret Rose Vendryes, Ph.D., was a professor of Art History for more than 20 years. She was a Distinguished Lecturer in Fine Arts and the Director of the York College Fine Arts Gallery. Dr. Vendryes entered the faculty of York College and The CUNY Graduate Center in 2000 and served as the Chair of the Department of Performing and Fine Arts from 2015 to 2021.

 Under her leadership, York College's Fine Arts Gallery shifted its audience focus to include the local Queens community. As part of that initiative, she founded the Southeast Queens Biennial and the upcoming inaugural Jamaica Summer Artist Residency at York College. She served in leadership positions on many campus-wide committees, including those for Writing Across the Curriculum and the Africana Studies Center, and was the LGBTQ+ faculty liaison.

 Dr. Vendryes was an art historian, visual artist, and curator. Her seminal book, Barthé, A Life in Sculpture (2008), is the first comprehensive monograph on the late African-American sculptor Richmond Barthé. As a visual artist, she exhibited widely, including in New York, Chicago, Boston, and at Art Basel Miami Beach. She was best known for her painting and mixed-media series "The African Diva Project," which merges African masks with commercial images of popular Black women soloists.

 Dr. Vendryes received her BA in fine arts from Amherst College, MA in art history from Tulane University, and Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University. Prior to York, she taught at Princeton University and Amherst College. Among several honors, Dr. Vendryes held an American Association of University Women Fellowship and was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

*Sadly, Dr. Vendryes passed away just two weeks before we would have honored her here as a living member of the York College family. She will be greatly missed.