La Sapienza - University of Rome

Raffaella Perna is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Sapienza University of Rome.
She is the author of several scholarly books, including Piero Manzoni e Roma (2017), Pablo Echaurren, il movimento del '77 e gli indiani metropolitani (2016), Arte, fotografia e femminismo in Italia negli anni Settanta (2013), Wilhelm von Gloeden (2013), and In forma di fotografia (2009).
Among the exhibitions she has curated or co-curated are Martha Rocher. Ritratti d’artista (MLAC, Rome); Mario Dondero. La libertà e l’impegno (Palazzo Reale, Milan); Ketty La Rocca. Se io fotovivo (Camera, Turin); The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy (Frigoriferi Milanesi, Milan); L’altro sguardo. Fotografe italiane 1965–2018(Triennale di Milano and Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2016, 2018); Ketty La Rocca (PAC, Ferrara, 2018); and Grandi fotografia a 33 giri (Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome, 2012).
She also serves as local unit coordinator for the PRIN 2022 research project Women Writing around the Camera (Principal Investigator: Laura Pandolfo, University of Sassari).
Since 2018, she has been the editor of the series Quaderni della Fondazione Echaurren Salaris, and from 2022 to 2024, she was responsible for the “Inter-University Network” project on behalf of the Fondazione Quadriennale di Roma.

Claudio Zambianchi was born in Rome in 1958. He earned a degree in Humanities with a specialization in Art History from Sapienza University of Rome (1984), a Master of Arts from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas (1989), and a PhD in Art History from Sapienza University (1992).
His primary research interests include late 19th- and early 20th-century English art and art criticism; 19th- and 20th-century American art; Italian art and criticism after World War II; and French art of the latter half of the 19th century. He has contributed essays to exhibition catalogues, academic journals, newspapers, and periodicals.
In 2000, he published a monograph on Claude Monet’s Water Lilies; in 2007, a general volume on Monet; in 2008, he co-edited, with Giuseppe Di Giacomo, an anthology of 20th-century art criticism; and in 2011, he authored Arte contemporanea: Dall’Espressionismo Astratto all’arte Pop. In 2012, he translated, edited, and introduced Clive Bell’s Art.
He has taught at the Academies of Fine Arts in Turin and Milan. From 1998 to 2018, he served as Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Sapienza University of Rome, and since January 2018, he has held the position of Full Professor of Contemporary Art History at the same institution.
From the founding of the Faculty of Humanities in 2002 until 2009, he served as the academic coordinator for teaching activities, and from November 2005 to October 2006, as Vice Dean. He was Deputy Director of DIGILAB, the digital humanities media center at Sapienza (2012–2014), and a member of the Board of the University Committee for Art History (Consulta Universitaria per la Storia dell’Arte – CUNSTA) for two consecutive terms (2006–2011).
He served as Director of the Postgraduate School in Historical-Artistic Heritage Studies (2013–2016), Erasmus coordinator for the Department of Art History and Performing Arts, and since 2016 has been Director of the Museum Laboratory of Contemporary Art at Sapienza.
Currently, he is the scientific director of the Lionello Venturi Archive (Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art and Performing Arts – SARAS) and a member of the Doctoral Program Board in Art History at Sapienza. He is co-editor of the online journal Piano B and serves on the editorial board of the journal Studi di Scultura.

Lara Conte is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History in the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts at Roma Tre University.
Her research focuses on postwar art and criticism, particularly the second half of the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on alternative narratives and marginal trajectories. Her work investigates issues of reception, transnational relations, exhibition histories, and the intersections between artistic practices, criticism, and feminism.

She is a member of the Roma Tre University research unit for the PRIN 2017 project Transatlantic Transfers: The Italian Presence in Postwar America, 1949–1972. She also serves on the scientific committee of the Centro Conservazione e Restauro dei Beni Culturali “La Venaria Reale” in Turin, and is involved in the RESCUE – Regeneration of Disused Industrial Sites through Creativity in Europe project, funded by Creative Europe Culture.

Lara Conte teaches Contemporary Art History at Roma Tre University. Her scholarship consistently centers on postwar art and criticism, with particular attention to alternative narratives, modes of reception, transnational dynamics, the history of sculpture, and the interrelations between practice, criticism, and feminist thought.
Among her major publications are: Materia, corpo, azione. Ricerche artistiche processuali tra Europa e Stati Uniti. 1966–1970 (Electa, Milan 2010); Carla Lonzi: la duplice radicalità. Dalla critica militante al femminismo di Rivolta (with V. Fiorino and V. Martini, ETS, Pisa 2011); Carla Lonzi. Scritti sull’arte (with L. Iamurri, V. Martini, et al., Milan 2012); Paolo Icaro. Faredisfarerifarevedere (Mousse Publishing, Milan 2016); Artiste italiane e immagini in movimento. Identità, sguardi, sperimentazioni (with F. Gallo, Mimesis, Milan 2021); and Sculpture in Action. Eliseo Mattiacci in Rome (Ridinghouse, London 2022, published with the support of the Italian Council).

Elisa Genovesi is research fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, Department S.A.R.A.S. (History Anthropology Religions Art History Media and Performing Arts). She received a PhD in History of Art from the same university. The topic of her doctoral research was the didactic work of Toti Scialoja. Her research interests comprehend the historical-artistic context in Italy between the 19^th and 20^th centuries and from the post-war to the ‘80s. She is particularly interested in the history of art criticism and in the relationship of the Italian scene with France and the U.S.

Martina Rossi holds a PhD in Art History from Sapienza University of Rome.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Sapienza University for the PRIN 2020 project Italian Feminist Photography: Identity Politics and Gender Strategies. At the same institution, she collaborates with the Lionello Venturi Archive.

Her research interests span several fields, including the relationship between visual and theatrical practices from the 1940s to the 1960s—a topic explored in her doctoral dissertation and in her monograph From the Painted Surface to the Stage Space: The Artistic Neo-Avant-Garde in Rome, 1960–1967 (De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2022).
She also investigates the intersections between the art world and publishing practices (L. de Pinto, M. Rossi, The Exhibition and Cultural Activity of La Feltrinelli Bookstore in Rome, 1964–1969, Campisano Editore, forthcoming), as well as the history of postwar Italian exhibitions and art criticism (E. Genovesi, M. Rossi, Giovanni Carandente at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, 1955–1961, Silvana Editoriale, 2022).

Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including Venezia Arti (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari), Storia della Critica d’Arte. Annuario della S.I.S.C.A., L’Uomo Nero. Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità, and Arabeschi. Rivista internazionale di studi su letteratura e visualità.

Martina Caruso is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art and Performing Arts (S.A.R.A.S.) at Sapienza University of Rome.
She received her academic training at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she completed her PhD in Art History with a dissertation on Italian humanist photography. Her research interests include the history of photography and contemporary art in Italy.

She has held fellowships at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK) in Paris, and the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia.
She is the author of Italian Humanist Photography from Fascism to the Cold War (2016), and has curated or co-curated several exhibitions, including My Sister Who Travels (The Mosaic Rooms, 2014), Giulio Turcato (Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, 2014), and Women and Ruins: Archaeology, Photography and Landscape (American Academy in Rome, 2025).

Giulia Ricozzi graduated in 2018 in Studies in Art History from Sapienza University of Rome, with a dissertation on Lionello Venturi (Supervisor: Prof. Marco Ruffini). In 2020 she received a Master of Letters at the University of St Andrews, with research on the music video of Apeshit supervised by Prof. Marika Takanishi Knowles. She obtained her Master’s degree at Sapienza in 2022, with the thesis "Chiara Samugheo: fotografare l'Italia", under the guidance of Prof. Raffaella Perna and Prof. Ilaria Schiaffini. She collaborates with the Rome unit of PRIN 2020 Italian Feminist Photography, under the supervision of Prof. Perna. She completed the Specialization Course in Artistic Historical Heritage at Sapienza, with research focused on the definitive export of cultural heritage and the debate between private individuals and public institutions (Supervisor: Prof. Marica Mercalli). Her PhD project focuses on the work of Italian female photojournalists in the telling of non-Western realities between 1950 and 1990.