Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts with a dissertation on The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art, which was published in Spanish in 1989 and in English in 1994 and remains a standard work on that subject. She has organized exhibitions of Spanish polychrome sculpture, the paintings of Murillo, and Latin American colonial art, and published two anthologies of essays about Velázquez. In recent years, Dr. Stratton-Pruitt has turned to the study of Spanish colonial art.