Invited Speakers
Raffaele Bedarida
Raffaele Bedarida is an art historian and curator specializing in transnational modernism and politics. He is an Associate Professor of Art History at The Cooper Union in New York, where he coordinates the History and Theory of Art program. Bedarida holds a Ph.D. from the Art History Department of the CUNY Graduate Center, New York as well as M.A. and B.A. degrees from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. His research has focused on cultural diplomacy, migration, and exchange between Italy and the United States. He has also worked on exhibition history, censorship, and propaganda under Fascism and during the Cold War, from Futurism to Arte Povera. Since 2008, when he founded and curated the residency program Harlem Studio Fellowship in New York, Bedarida has actively promoted programs of international exchange for emerging artists. In addition to his academic and curatorial activities, Bedarida has regularly lectured on modern and contemporary art topics at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA. His research has been supported by the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Max Planck Institute of Art History, and the Italian Ministry of Research and University (MIUR).
Carmen Belmonte
Carmen Belmonte is a researcher at Università Roma Tre and the Scientific Coordinator of the research unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, MPI, within the project SPAZIDENTITÀ co-funded by the École Française de Rome (2022-2026). Her research focuses on the visual culture and legacy of Italian colonialism and fascism, as well as on critical approach to cultural heritage. She has been a research fellow of research and academic institutions, including the LARTTE LAB of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (2009-2011); the American Academy in Rome (2019); the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University (2020). Since 2021, she teaches at the University of Florence as an adjunct lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art. Among several articles and book chapters she recently published the book Arte e colonialismo in Italia. Oggetti, immagini, migrazioni (1882-906), Collana del Kunsthistorisches Institut, Venezia, Marsilio, 2021.
Sharon Hecker
Sharon Hecker (BA Yale University cum laude, MA and PhD University of California at Berkeley) is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art. She is a leading authority on Medardo Rosso and has published extensively on key twentieth-century Italian artists, including Lucio Fontana, Luciano Fabro, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone and Francesco Lo Savio. Her books include A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (University of California Press, 2017, awarded the Millard Meiss Publication Fund from the College Art Association and published in Italian by Johan & Levi Editore); with Marin R. Sullivan, Postwar Italian Art History: Untying the Knot (Bloomsbury, 2018); with Silvia Bottinelli, Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2020); Finding Lost Wax: The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso (Brill, 2020), with Raffaele Bedarida, Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today (Bloomsbury, 2022), with Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy: Literature, Art and Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2023).
Charles L. Leavitt
Charles L. Leavitt IV is Associate Professor of Italian and Film and Associate Director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. A Faculty Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and a Research Fellow of the University of Reading, UK, Leavitt studies modern and contemporary Italian culture in a comparative context. He is the author of Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), which won the 2020 Book Prize in Visual Studies, Film and Media from the American Association for Italian Studies and was shortlisted for the Bridge Literary Prize in North American non-fiction.
Micaela Pavoncello
Micaela Pavoncello is a proud member of the Jewish Community of Rome. She was born in Rome to a Jewish Roman father (proud to be there since Caesar’s time!) and a Libyan Jewish Sephardic mother. She is married to Angelo and they have three sons, Gabriel, Nathan, and Isaac. She has lived in Rome her entire life, except for one year in which she lived in Argentina and another year in Israel. She is in love with her city and that’s the reason why she decided to study Art History at Rome’s university. Traveling has given her the opportunity to meet other Jews, share her story with them, and compare her community with theirs and other communities. Throughout her time as a guide, while meeting people along her journey, she has come to realize how miraculous the existence of the Jewish Community of Rome really is.
She founded Jewish Roma Walking Tours in 2003 after completing her studies in Art History and a year of research at the central Archive of Rome where she was looking for documents about her family during the ghetto times. She also had a full time job at MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, where she was responsible for the exhibitions department and had the opportunity to meet artists, collectors, curators, and visitors from all over the world.