The Firestorm Master Thesis of 2025: The Art of Framing Diversity

The thesis is the result of the first ever Firestorm Scholarship in 2025. The scholarship supports Master thesis projects that promote and support knowledge creation on the status and progress of female artists on the global market. The Firestorm Scholarship is made possible through the support of The Firestorm Foundation, an independent foundation dedicated to advancing gender equality in the arts. The Foundation’s mission is to increase awareness, research, and action around the representation and recognition of female artists, and to contribute to a more inclusive and equitable global art market.

Through this collaboration, the Art Initiative at SSE continues its commitment to fostering interdisciplinary research at the intersection of art, markets, and society, while supporting students in addressing critical contemporary challenges through their academic work.

Read more about the scholarship here.

"The Art of Framing Diversity: A Qualitative Study Examining How Corporate Art Collections are Leveraged to Support DEI Initiatives" by Ella Wiss Mencke and Federico Sangiorgi. Find the theisis here.

"We want to extend our sincere gratitude for your support throughout our research project. We are delighted to share that our thesis, The Art of Framing Diversity: A Qualitative Study Examining How Corporate Art Collections are Leveraged to Support DEI Initiatives, received a very good grade from our professors at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Your encouragement made a tangible difference in allowing us to pursue this work. Following the advice of our thesis advisors, we took the direction of examining female representation in corporate art collections. This perspective naturally led us to explore the broader intersection between corporate art collections (CACs) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

These cases demonstrate that when intentionally curated, CACs can become tools for inclusion – visually embedding gender equality into an organization’s identity and sparking meaningful conversations about representation. However, our research also identified an “activation gap”: without structured policies, benchmarks, and collaboration between DEI and curatorial functions, collections risk being symbolic rather than transformative.

For your reference, we have attached Appendix 4 from our thesis on the following page, as it provides a clear summary of female representation across the collections we studied.

With gratitude,

Ella Wiss Mencke & Federico Sangiorgi"