Emelie Gevalt is Curator of Folk Art at the American Folk Art Museum. Her research interests include 18th- and 19th-century American portraiture, painted furniture, and African American material culture; her work often looks at such earlier material through the lens of 20th-century histories of collecting and collective memory. Gevalt has held internships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She has also held positions at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and Christie's, New York, where she was a Vice President and Senior Account Manager in the Trusts and Estates department. She received her Bachelor of Arts in art history and theater studies from Yale and her Master of Arts from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. Her Winterthur thesis, on the topic of early 18th-century painted chests from Taunton, Massachusetts, was published in Chipstone's 2018 edition of American Furniture.

Gevalt's doctoral dissertation, supervised by Dr. Jennifer Van Horn, is titled "Unseen New England: Identity and Exclusion in the Landscapes of the 18th-Century Interior." Looking through the lens of race and the construction of social hierarchy, her project investigates the conflicting forces of predominantly white New England memory-making and the collective forgetting of Black and Native histories, through a trans-temporal study of some of the region's earliest locally produced images. Analysis focuses on pictures created for the social spaces of British American homes, especially overmantel paintings, wall paintings, portraits, and needlework with landscape imagery, produced during the span of a generation from the late 1710s to the 1790s, in such regional centers as Boston and Portsmouth, New Hampshire; in the plantations outside of Newport, Rhode Island; and in the developing countryside towns of Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. Concurrently, Gevalt is working on an exhibition project that addresses African American presence and absence within these contexts.