Maria Antonella Pelizzari
Professor of Art History

Maria Antonella Pelizzari teaches courses in the History of Photography at Hunter College, focusing on issues of cultural representation, historiography, and collecting, for both nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. Her expertise covers a wide range of subjects and time periods, such as Italian photography and culture from its beginnings to the present, nineteenth-century British colonialism, American modernism, and the interdisciplinary dialogue between photography and architecture. Pelizzari’s publications include articles in History of Photography, Visual Resources, Afterimage, Casabella, Fotologia, and essays in books and catalogues. She has edited the volume Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, CCA and Yale Center for British Art, 2003 (awarded the book prize “Historians of British Art” in 2004) and she has published books in Italian on American photography exhibitions in the Sixties and Seventies. In addition, she is part of the editorial board of History of Photography, and she has been a reviewer for the MacArthur Fellowship and the J.Paul Getty Foundation.

Pelizzari earned her PhD from the University of New Mexico and her MA from the Universita’ di Genova, in Italy. She has been Associate Curator of Photography at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, and has held teaching positions at Concordia University (Montreal) and Ryerson University (Toronto). She is currently working on a book on Photography and Italy (in contract with Reaktion Press), a historical study that represents the first and only book on this subject in English literature. Pelizzari is also preparing an edited book on Photography and Architecture, which will be introduced with her session at the College Art Association in 2009.