Renée Albiston was recently recognized at the CU Denver College of Arts & Media’s 2025 Alumni Dinner & Awards Ceremony as a recipient of the Outstanding Alumni Award. Albiston holds two degrees from CU Denver—a dual bachelor’s degree in art history and history (2014) and a master of humanities in visual studies (2017). Her studies at CU Denver focused on art, law, and policy, and specifically military looting of art and its restitution. Now, Albiston works at the Denver Art Museum in that institution’s Provenance Department, where she traces the history of the museum’s works of art.

Albiston used her classes at CU Denver to transition from a career in medical sales to art history, driven by a desire to work in a more fulfilling field. Coming to school for a second time was a challenge, especially with her young son in tow, but Albiston credits the faculty members in the College of Art & Media’s art history department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ humanities department for working not only with her schedule, but also to help her create a degree path that was tailored to the career she had in mind.

While studying at CU Denver, Albiston received an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) grant to conduct research at the Monuments Men and Women archives and attended the College Art Association Conference in New York City on a scholarship. While in school, she had the opportunity to work at the Kirkland Museum, and stayed there for 12 years, eventually working her way up to become Associate Director of the museum.

Albiston is now the Associate Provenance Researcher at the Denver Art Museum, focusing on Nazi-era, native arts, and colonial contexts. Her work has her researching the history of works of art and how and why those pieces changed hands and came to appear in a museum’s collection. With the Denver Art Museum, Albiston researches a diverse range of objects, including pre-Columbian objects, African objects, European paintings and sculptures, and Native American objects. Albiston says it’s very fulfilling to work “on behalf of people that can't speak for themselves anymore and that can't claim their culture back.”

One project Albiston is particularly proud of had her tracing the history of Amadeo Modigliani’s Portrait de Femme. “I was able to complete a full provenance, a full history of ownership, from creation to when it ended up at the Denver Art Museum,” she explains.

Albiston credits her employer for being among a limited number of museums in the U.S. with departments dedicated to provenance work. With an increasing number of museums finding themselves the subject of scrutiny when it comes to some of the artwork in their possession, provenance work is starting to intersect with risk management considerations.

For Albiston, though, provenance is more about restitution than anything else. “What motivates me is the fact that I have the potential to right a wrong of the past and to leave behind some kind of positive mark on the world,” she says.