Rose Valland, curator of the Jeu de Paume art museum in Paris during the WWII German occupation, is credited with infiltrating Nazi leadership to save more than 60,000 artworks stolen from Jewish owners. Last year, award-winning journalist Michelle Young published the definitive account of this unlikely heroine in The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of World War II Resistance Hero Rose Valland. The book made “best of the year” lists from NY Public Library to Hyperallergic and won a Massachusetts Book Awards nonfiction honor.
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Michelle Young is an award-winning journalist and author. Her latest book, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of World War II Resistance Hero Rose Valland was named a Best Book of 2025 by the New York Public Library, Library Journal, and Hyperallergic, and was named an Honor Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. The Art Spy was also a finalist for the Marfield Prize and The Lambda Literary Prize and was longlisted for the American Library of Paris Book Award. Michelle’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Airmail, The Forward and Town & Country. She is a graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University, and lives in the Berkshires, MA.
Alicia Anstead is a writer, editor, producer and educator. She oversees creative productions at the Office for the Arts at Harvard, where she also teaches narrative journalism. She is formerly the executive editor of Inside Arts, the magazine for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals in Washington, DC, and of The Writer magazine in Boston. As an arts reporter at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, she also covered food and food writing (and worked in Maine restaurant kitchens). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, The Harvard Gazette and Art New England. She has been an arts contributor to The Callie Crossley Show and Under the Radar with Callie Crossley on WGBH in Boston and NPR's Morning Edition. An English department graduate of American University (B.A.) and the University of Maine (M.A.), she has been a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and NEA arts editor program at Duke University. She has been a contributing producer, editor and strategist for APAP|NYC, the largest annual conference of performing arts professionals, the Sphinx Organization where she co-produced the first two SphinxCon conferences on diversity in the arts, the Boston Book Festival, Shakespeare in Stonington at Opera House Arts, Sister Cities International and the National Archives Foundation. (Photo credit: Michele Stapleton)